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. Independently, I always love, 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 were like, we're young, we're like six, seven, and all the kids like, ah, you know, and afraid they were gonna cut their feet on glass, 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, my feet turned in and stuff like that. So I felt like 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 a coach would gallant 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, 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 or just kind of chill. But I would just sit there and they'd go up and down, and come back down, which makes it worse, that they'd be out, and I'd still be- Why does it make it worse? Because 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 and 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. Like, oh, and that's- It's not an O2 deprivation, it's a trigger 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. A magician friend of mine who's amazing, and one of my heroes in life, he told me a story as I was doing like Buried Alive, and I was saying, he said, you know, the Navy SEALs, they black them out under water, so they're not afraid of drowning. And I'm like, that can't, no way. Because it seems so abstract to me. So, but it stuck in my brain. And then when I wanted to do the water tank stunt, and I started learning about freediving 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 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 by the way, nobody should try this, you know, there is extreme dangerous to shallow water blackouts, which lead to death. But if you are in somebody that's training and you have a team and you wanna 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 getting knocked out. Getting choked out. It's your fork, no, but no, yeah. Choked out is your fork. Right, exactly. Except this one's even better. And then you have all these dreams, no, no. You make it sound exciting. That part of it, 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, it's amazing. And they're like, what? Oh, wow. And 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 out is just, it just shuts off the blood to the brain and the brain shuts off. And then it comes back online, but 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 like to. Oh, wow. By the way, you guys were talking about me on the thing, about the breath hold thing. Yeah, yeah. One time I went 20 minutes and two seconds. 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 shit. And they pulled me up because they were freaked out. They thought you were dying. 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. With 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 cold, the blood rushes away from the extremities and protects the vital organs. And because he didn't inhale the water because 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 that just shows you that there's like certain levels of what the body can tolerate that we have no idea. So you, 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. Like 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. What have 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 was around the best swimmers and he had access to it and he got up to three and a half minutes. So by the time I was like a teenage, 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 and was that, so I was like, okay, that 330 seems like the edge. But then when I started working on the actual concept of like, how long can you hold your breath for it? Then I started looking into it 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 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 hyperventil, 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 and everything, no oxygen. And I was with Luke Akins who jumped from 25,000 feet with no parachute landing on that. He was with me and two other, the pilot and two other guys. Just right under 25, that was a 24, seven, whatever. And I said, let's see who goes hypoxic first, right? No, no, no, but you have to take the O2, you have to take the O2 monitors, you have to be on them. So, and I was already in a hypobaric chamber with the FAA at Oklahoma City and I started purging just to see what it would do. And my oxygen level 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 gonna go out, 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, phew, phew, phew, 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, aha, like fake news. That's what he wrote on the paper next to the levels because 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 because 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, they go up to the top of Everest, up to 29,000 feet and they're not bringing oxygen. I get it, they're acclimating, 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 essentially 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. 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. Yeah, when we're done with this, I'll show you how to do it. And 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? Yeah. And black out. 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, yeah, yeah. It's a long. Okay, let's go. Okay, and I forget where I'm going sometimes. It's okay, don't worry about it. Okay, so you might have to remind me where we're going. Yeah. Okay. I just want to know the process because you're a magician by trade, right? 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 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 art. It's mind blowing. It's an art, it's a performance piece. It's not like, it's incredible. Now look, there's guys that are card guys that are like that also. Like lots of people I love and respect. They do the cards in a way that's like, but that act to me was what pressed a button. It was like, whoa. Yeah. Yeah.