Why David Blaine Learned to Hold His Breath for 17 Minutes

So in that section, I pulled out a book and I was like six years old and I see a guy chained to the side of a building staring out looking like death is upon him. And that was Houdini. And I didn't know anything about what that all meant. I looked through the pictures and he was hanging upside down and stuff like that. But when I went to sleep, I would have these dreams of this guy chained to the side of a building. And that began my curiosity and love of Houdini. And then that began my curiosity of like, not just like the magic trick stuff, but like this stuff. That's to me, it's more like real. Yeah. How do those two worlds collide? Because some of the things you're doing, they're just insane endurance and mental exercises. And then other things you're doing are what you would consider magic. Right. So I love both separately, like independently. I had a karate teacher at the YMCA that used to make us all run barefoot in the snow in the winter in Brooklyn. And all the kids, we're young, we're like six, seven, and all the kids like, ah, and afraid they were going to cut their feet on glass or whatever. And I would run in it. And I felt like I could do this because I wasn't good at other things physically. Like I was more at my feet turned in and stuff like that. So I felt like this, I could do these things. So then I learned how to hold my breath. And the reason I learned how to hold my breath was simply because I was on the swim team at the Y also, and the other kids would swim back and forth and they'd destroy me because my feet didn't function perfectly well. And what I learned is that if I didn't breathe, if I just swam, it would save me time because I didn't have to move my head, dip it out and you know, right. So I would just swim and the coach would yell at me, but suddenly I was no longer in last place. I was like now second and sometimes first. And that began my like, Oh God, you can actually do what the coach doesn't think is possible. You could swim there and back without breathing. And then the older kids would come to see me do that. And I would like challenge them. I'd be like, um, let's see, you could stay under the longest and you can go up and down five times. I didn't understand the physiology of it that like going up and down doesn't help. It's more effective to just sit through the pain of kind of chill, but I would just sit there and they'd go up and come back down at, which makes it worse that they'd be out. And I'd still make it worse because, uh, the breath holding thing is all about like a CO2 buildup in your bloodstream. And it's about a tolerance level to it. So if you relax and efficiently keep your oxygen, not make this CO2 buildup more extreme, you can actually hold more efficiently. So when you have that feeling, everybody has that feeling where you need to breathe. It's not an O2 deprivation. It's a from a CO2 buildup, which is giving you an alert that for example, in 20 minutes from now, you will not recover. And I didn't believe that either. So a magician friend of mine, who's amazing. Um, and, and one of my like heroes in life, uh, he, he told me a story as I was doing like buried alive and I was saying, he said, you know, you know, the Navy seals, you know, they black them out underwater. So they're not afraid of drowning. And I'm like, that can't no way. Like, cause it seems so abstract to me, you know? So, but it's stuck in my brain. And then when I wanted to do the water tank stunt and I started learning about free diving and stuff like that, I suddenly realized blacking out is pretty straightforward. Like you black out and then you get your head above the water. And if you're supervised, you're fine. So when I went to San Diego with the seals, I watched what they do and I actually did it, but I didn't black out. I went back and forth a few times in pool, but they have that viewing pool and they rope the seals up to some 45 pound weights and they have to walk across the bottom of the pool. And the instructors are swimming above them. And when the, when the seals black out, they cut the rope, bring them up to the top and they're fine. But what that teaches you is that you do not need to worry about being underwater because if you're with a team and you, but by the way, nobody's tried this, you know, there is extreme dangerous to shall water blackouts, which lead to death. But if you are in somebody that's training and you have a team and you want to push it, as soon as you black out, it's like getting knocked out, but it feels better. It's not like getting knocked out with a punch. It's like you get knocked out. It's euphoric. No, but no. Yeah. Choked out is euphoric. Right. Yeah, exactly. Except this one's even better. And then you have all these dreams. You make it sound exciting. That part of it, when, whenever I wake up from a blackout, I'm like, Whoa, that's how people wake up when they get choked out. Really? The same? Yeah. When people get choked out, they wake up almost like they were dreaming. Like sometimes they think they're at a disco. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. They're like, wow. And, uh, it's not the best thing in the world for you, but it's way better for you than getting knocked unconscious. Yeah. Yeah. Choked. Yeah. Choked out is just a, it just shuts off the blood to the brain and the brain shuts off. Yeah. And then it comes back online. There's no trauma. Right. Yeah. But it's not. Yeah. So it's like a blacking out underwater. The blacking out underwater thing, probably not a good idea to do too many times though, right? No, you could do it. I mean, I've blacked out underwater a lot. By the way, so. How many times? I don't know, like between 20 to 30. I mean, I have to. Oh, wow. By the way, you guys were talking about me on the thing about the breath hold thing. Yeah. One time I went 20 minutes and two seconds. So I almost did what you were talking about, the length of a show, but I did 20 minutes and two seconds and I had telemetry there and I had pulmonary experts and everything like that. And my heart rate dropped to eight beats per minute. Holy ----. And they pulled me up cause they were freaked out. They thought you were dying. Yeah. But back to what I was saying is the reason besides the Navy SEAL story that I knew that it made sense was because you hear about the kids in the news, like in 1984 or whatever it was, a kid was under an icy river for 45 minutes. Nothing blacked out unconscious underwater for 45 minutes. They rescue him out, pull him back, recover him and full recovery. So there's something that the body does that we don't understand it. But if you actualize, so because he blacked out and because it was so cold, the blood shunting occurred. We're all like the same as when you get called the blood rushes away from the extremities and protects the vital organs. And because he didn't inhale the water cause it was completely out of it when they recovered him, they didn't even have to get water out of his lungs and he was perfectly fine. Wow. So, but, but that just shows you that there's like a certain levels of, of what the body can tolerate that we have no idea. So you in, in learning how to swim and learning how to go all the way back and forth and holding your breath, this started this idea of holding your breath for an extreme long period of time. What had been the record before you had like 20 minutes and how many seconds, two seconds? Yeah. That's what you did? Yeah. But that's not the record. But what had you done before that? What had been your record? Okay. So when I was a kid, I heard as I start reading about Houdini, his like proud record of his lifetime and he's the underwater escape king for a hundred years ago. And he had, he was around the best swimmers and he had access to, and he got up to three and a half minutes. So by the time I was like a teenage or early teenager, I got to three and a half minutes. And did you think that that was a barrier that couldn't be crossed? Well, I came, I blacked out as I came out, but I didn't know what that all meant. Right. So I blacked out. Was that, so I was like, okay, that three 30 seems like the edge. But then when I started working on the actual concept of like, how long can you hold your breath for? Then I started looking into, and I'm like, oh wow, there's like people that can do five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes. And then there was a hypothetical record of, um, of, uh, a hypothetical 13 minute record, but no evidence of it. And that was on Pure O2. So it was a hypothetical Pure O2 record of 13. When you say on Pure O2, what's the process? That flushes everything out. So you start Pure O2, you hold on to Pure O2 and then you go under? I purge really hard on Pure O2, which is like hyperventilating, which gets rid of the CO2 and gives you more room for oxygen. And by the way, I just went up to 25,000 feet in an airplane, ascending at 500 feet per minute, doors open, everything, no oxygen. And I was with Luke Aikens who jumped from 25,000 feet with no parachute landing in that. He was with me and two other, the pilot and two other guys. We just right under 25, it was a 24, seven, whatever. And, um, he's, I said, let's see who goes hypoxic first. Right. So no, no, no, but we had, no, but you have to take the ox, the O2. You have to take the O2 monitors. You have to be on them. Right. So, and I was already in a hypo barrack chamber with the FA at Oklahoma city. And I started purging just to see what it would do. And my levels, my oxygen levels shot up, which nobody believes is possible. So I get into the airplane and we put the monitors on and everybody's around the same. I was actually lower than Luke. I was like at 90, whatever, 596. He was at like 97. He's like, Oh, I'm winning. You're joking with me. And as soon as we crossed 15,000 feet, his slowly is starting to come down. And I start doing the breathing technique, the purging out, like I said, right. My oxygen levels. And we filmed all this shot up to 98 and then 99% is I went up to 23 plus thousand feet. Now these guys think I'm a magician. So they're like, yeah, like fake news. That's what he wrote on the paper next to the levels. Cause he was recording it. So I took his monitor off of his finger and he took mine. I put his monitor on my finger, put mine on his bang. His was dropping around 70 and mine was 98, 99. Then I switched with day. I switched with everybody on the plane and the oxygen levels with the breathing all the way up to that altitude. And I'm not recommending this cause I haven't tested enough in it, but they did stay up at 98, 99. And so my evidence for that was you hear about all the Sherpas that go up to the top of Everest up to 29,000 feet and they're not bringing oxygen. I get it. They're acclimating six, but they're still at 29 plus thousand feet. So they're doing something that's allowing them to rewire their ability to not go hypoxic. So this breathing technique, you're exhaling more than you're breathing in. So you're breathing a small amount in and then I fill up everything for full, but I mean full, like top to bottom hold for a second and then exhale slowly. And I like, for example, if when we're done here, if you have 20 minutes, I'll get you up to a four and a half minute breath hold in 20 minutes. And this is just through these breathing techniques. When we're done with this, I'll show you how to do it. You will get up to four plus minutes for sure. And how did you, so you've learned that you could go three and a half minutes or three minutes plus, right? And blackout. And then how did you have it in your head that you were going to eventually get to 20 minutes? Okay. So you really want to hear all that? Yeah. It's a long, I'll go, let's go. Okay. And I forget where I'm going. Okay. So you might have to remind me where we're going. Yeah. Okay. I just want to know the process by trade. Well, but first of all, I like Houdini. So I love magic, but I like Houdini and Houdini was like king of cards as well, but he's a guy that's doing real things. And then I like guys that are like, as I go, I go to the museum of broadcasting because there was no YouTube or whatever. So I'd look at like these magic, you search magic. And I'd find like guys that would like drink a gallon of water, drink a liter of kerosene. He would float all the kerosene on top of the water. And then he would spit out kerosene out of his mouth, look like a human dragon, and then put the fire out with a gallon of water. So it's that it is magic, but it's, it's art. It's mind blowing. It's an art. It's a performance. It's not like it's incredible. Now look, there's guys that are card guys that are like that also, like lots, lots of people. I love them. They do the cards in a way that's like, but, but that act to me was what pressed a button. It was like, Whoa.