Why David Blaine Learned to Hold His Breath for 17 Minutes

the jurgen experience 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 hudi 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 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 they're just insane endurance and mental exercises and then other things you're doing are what you would consider magic right so so i love both separately like independently like i always love like 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 you know we're young we're like six seven and all the kids like ah you know i'm 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 born 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 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 and just kind of chill but i would just sit there and they'd go up and come back down which makes it worse that they'd be out and i just doesn't 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 and not make this co2 build up more extreme you can actually hold more efficiently so when you have that feeling everybody has that feeling where you need to breathe 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 some a magician friend of mine who's amazing um and one of my like heroes in life uh he he told me a story as i was doing like buried alive i was saying he said you know you know the navy seals you know they black them out under water so they're not afraid of drowning and i'm like that can't no way like because it seems so abstract to me you know so but it 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 and pulled 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 this 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 dangers to shallow 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 it's but it feels better it's not like getting knocked out with a punch it's like you're getting nothing it's your four no but no yeah choked out is euphoric right yeah exactly except this one's even better and then you have all these dreams no no it makes 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 and they're like what yeah 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 yeah choked out is just a it just shuts off the blood to the brain right and the brain shuts off yeah 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 under 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 i mean by the way so okay times i don't know like between 20 to 30. i mean wow by the way you guys were talking about me on the thing about the breath hold thing yeah so 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 in 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 because they were freaked out that's why you were dying yeah but back to what i'm saying is the reason besides the navy seal story that i knew that it was 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 yeah with nothing blacked out unconscious underwater for 45 minutes they rescue him out pull him back recover him in full recovery so there's something that the body does that we don't understand and 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 he 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 like what had been the record before you would like 20 minutes and how many seconds two seconds yeah that's what you did yeah what have you done what have you done before that would have 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 and he got up to three and a half minutes so by the time i was like uh 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 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 then i started looking into it 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 pure02 so it was a hypothetical bureau two record of 13. when you say on pure02 what's your process that flushes everything out so which is like hypervent 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 landed in that he was with me and two other the pilot and two other guys we just right under 25 that's a 24 7 whatever and um he's i said let's see who goes hypoxic first right so no no no but we have 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 hypobaric 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 going to go out you know joking with me and as soon as we cross 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 uh-huh 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 date 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 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 essentially exhaling more than you're breathing in so you're breathing a small amount in and then 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'd like for example if when 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 you've learned that you could go three and a half minutes or three minutes plus right and 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 it's a long i'll go let's go okay and i forget where i'm going okay it's okay okay so you might have to remind me where we're going yeah okay i just want to know the process because okay magician 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 right 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 art it's a performance p 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 and they do the cards in a way that's like but but that act to me was what pressed a button it was like [Applause] whoa

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 1,169,108

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Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: GjB0Dqoqbb8

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/barooka]

He never answers one fucking question fully in the whole damn podcast

[u/modernDaySparta]

Here's a video of the breathing technique that he uses. https://youtu.be/37dLxjhQYaE

[u/NormalAndy]

Saved it but that’s A proper Illusion right? 17 mins is a death sentence.

[u/CENSORED_ENOUGH]

Very interesting. I think that if you push the feeling of CO2 deprivation every day a little bit at a time, you can hold your breath longer.