As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges.
So I began, early on, competing against other kids,
seeing how long I could stay under water while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, I stayed under on one breath.
By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds.
I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record.
In 1987, I heard of a story about the boy that felt through ice and was trapped under the river.
He was underneath, not breathing for forty-five minutes.
When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage.
His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees.
As a magician, I think everything is possible.
And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others.
I started to think if the boy could survive without breathing for that long, there must be a way that I could do it.
So, I met with a top neurosurgeon.
And I asked him how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air?
And he said to me, anything over six minutes, you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage.
So, I took that as a challenge, basically.
My first try,I figured that I could do something similar and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water.
And I stayed inside of that water tank, hoping my core temperature would start to drop.
And I was shivering. In my first attempt to hold my breath, I couldn't even last a minute.
So I realized that was completely not going to work.
So I went to talk to a doctor friend.
And I asked him, "How could I do that?"
"I wanted to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?"
And he said, "David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing. It'll be much easier."
So, he came up with this idea, of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber,
which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it,
that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow would be able to circulate and rebreathe with this thing in me.
This is a little hard to watch. But this is that attempt.
So, that clearly wasn't going to work.
Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing.
There's a chemical that's called perflubron.
And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it.
So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it,
and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which is really impossible.
It was basically like trying to breathe, as a doctoer said, while having an elephant standing on your chest.
So that idea disappeared.
Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart/lung bypass machine
and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery,
and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood?
Which was another insane idea, obviously.
Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas: to actually do it.
To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead.
So, I started researching into pearl divers.
You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath.
And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving.
It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered, pretty much.
There is many different aspects to free-diving.
There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can.
And then there's static apnea.
That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving.
That was the one that I studied.
The first thing I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy.
And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood.
So, I learned never to move and I learned how to slow my heart rate down.
I had to remain perfectly still and just relax, and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that.
And then I learned how to purge.
Purging is basically hyperventilating.
You blow in and out --
You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling.
And you're really ridding your body of CO2.
So, when you hold your breath, it's infinitely easier.
Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath,
and just hold and relax and never let any air out,
and just hold and relax through all the pain.
Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath,
for out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes.
So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute.
And I would hold, immediately after, for five and a half minutes.
Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can.
And immediately after that I would hold again, for five and a half minutes.
I would repeat this process 8 times in a row.
Out of 52 minutes, you're only breathing for eight minutes.
At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain.
You'll feel like walking around in a daze. And you have these awful headaches.
Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff.