As a magician, I tried to create images that make people stop and think.
I also try to chanllege myself to do things that doctor say that it is not possible.
I was buried alive in New York city in a coffin , buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999 for a week.
I lived there , but nothing but water.
And it end up being so much fun, that I decided I could persuade doing more these things.
The next one is I frozze myself from a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York city.
That one was way more difficult than I had expected.
The one after that, I stood on the top of a hundred foot pillar for 36 hours .
I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like a big animal heads.
In london I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water.
It was for me one of the most difficult things I've ever had done,but it was also the most beautiful.
There were so many skeptics especially the press in London , that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me.
So I felt very validated when the new England Journal of medicine actually used the research for science.
My next persuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breething ,like how long I could survive with nothing not even air.
I didn't realize that it would become the most amzing journey of my life.
As a young megician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges.
So I begin early on competitiong against other kids.
Seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times while I stayed under on one breathe.
By the time I was a teenger , I was able to hold my breathe for three minutes and thirty seconds.
I would later find out that was houdini's personal record.
In 1987, I heard of a story about a boy that fell through the ice and was trapped in a river.
He was undernethe, not breathing for 45 minutes.
When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage.
his core temperature has dropped to 77 degrees.
As a megician I think everything is possible.
And I think if something is done one person and 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 that anything over 6 minutes you have a serious risk of a hypoxic brain damage.
So I took that as a challenge basiclly.
My first try , I figure that I could do something simillar , And I created a water tank, and filled with ice and freezing cold water.
And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my my core temperature would start to drop.
And I was shivering In my first attempt to hold my breathe 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 go , how could I do that?
I want to hold my breathe for really long time how could I be done ?
And he said ,"David , you are a magicine , create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier."
So he came up with this idea, of creating a rebreather with a CO2 scrubber.
which was basicly a tube from home depot,with a balloon duct-taped to it
He thought we could put inside of me , somehow be able to circulate the air 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 to think about, Liquid breathing.
There is chemical that is called perflubron
And it is so high in oxygen levels that is theory, you could breathe it.
So I got my hands in that chemical, filled the sink up with it .
And stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in , which was really impossible.
It is basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor say 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 tried to hold my breathe past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead.
So,I started researching into peral divers.
You know because they go down for four minutes on one breathe .
And when I was researching peral divers I found the world of free diving.
It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered pretty in much.
There are many different aspects to free-diving.
There is depth records where people go as deep as they can .
And then there is static apnea
That is holding your breathe as long as you can in one place without moving.
That was the one that I studied.
The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breathe 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 basicly hyperventilating .
You blow in and out...
you do that you get light headed , you get tingling
And you're really ridding of your body of CO2
So when you're holding your breathe its infinitely easier.
Then I learned that you have to take a huge breathe,
That is 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 breathe for that hold my breathe.
for at 52 minutes, I would hold my breathe for 44 minutes.
So basicly it was that means I was purged I breathe really hard for a minute.
And then I would hold immediately after for five and half minutes.
And then I was breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can .
And then immediately after that, I would hold again for five and half minutes.
I would repeat this process eight times in a row.
Out of 52 minutes . you re only breathing for eight minutes.
At the end of that you're walking around in daze.
And you have these awful headaches
Basically I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff.
I started to learning about the world-record holder.
And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breathe.
He's sixty foot four. He's 160 pounds.
And his total lung capacity twice the size of average person.
I am sixty for one, and fat.
as We'll say big-boned.
I had to drop 50 pounds in three months.
So everything that I put into my body I considered as madicine.
Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value.
I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day
And I started to really adapt my body.
The thinner I was, the longger I was able to hold my breathe.
And by eating so well trainning so hard , My resting heat-rate dropped to 38 beats per minutes, which is lower than most Olympic ethletes.
In four mounths training , I was able to hold my breathe for over seven minutes.
I wanted to try holding my breathe everywhere, I wanted to try it in the most extreme stuations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress.
I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television.
The world record was eight minutes and fifty eight second held by tom sietas that guy with the whale lung I told you about.
I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln center.
And if I stay there a week not eating I would get comfortable in that situation.
And I was slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breathe longer than I had been able to do it.
I entre the sphere, a week before the scheduled air date.
And I thought everything seem to be on track.
Two days before my big breathe hold attempt, for the record , the producers of my television special thought that.
Just watching somebody holding their breathe and almost drowning is too borning the television.
So I had to add handcuffs while holding my breathe to escape from.
This was a critical mistake.
Because of the movement, I am wasting the oxygen.
And by 7 minutes , I had gone into these awful convulsions.
By seven away , I started to blackout.
And by seven minutes and 13 seconds , they had to pull my body out and bring me back.
I had failed at any level.
So naturally , The only way out of slump that I could think of was, I decide to call oprah.
I told her that I want to up the ante and hold my breathe longer than any khuman beings ever had.
This was a different record, This is a pure O2 static opnea record that Guinness had set the world record as 13 minutes
So basically you breathe pure O2 first, Oxygenating your body, flushing out your CO2, and you are able to hold much longer.
I relized that my real competation was the beaver.
In Janurary 08, Operah give me four months to prepare and train.
So I would sleep in hypoxic tent every night.
The hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates attitude at 15000 feet. it's like a base camp Everest.
Was that does is you start building up a red blood cell count in your body which helps to carry out oxygen better.
Every mornimg, again, after getting out of the tent your brain is compltely wiped out.
My first attempt on pure O2 is able to go up to 15 minutes,
So it was a pretty big success.
The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind at 15 minutes your brain is down , you are brain dead.
So he pulled me up, and I was fine.
There was one person that there was definitely not impressed.
was my ex-girl friend.
While I was breaking down the record underwater for the first time, she was thifting through my blackburry checking all my messages.
My brother had picture of it. It was really is.
I then annnounced that I was going to go for Sieta's record publiicly.
And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly and broke his old record.
Then his main competatiors, went out and broke his record.
So he sudddenly pushed his record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds.
Which was 3 minutes longer that I have prepared and you know is longer than the record.
Now, I want to get the science time to document this .I want to get them to do a piece on it.
So I did what any person seriously persuing scientific advancement would do.
I walked onto the New York Time offices and did card tricks to everybody.
So I do not know if it was a magic or the lore of the Cayman islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding.
While he was there , I tried to impress him , of course.
I did I dive down to 160 feet, which is like you know basically the height of a 16 story building
And As I was coming up I blocked out underwater, which is really dangenous that's how you drown.
Luckly, Krik had seen me and he swam over and pulled me out.
So I started full focus.
I completed trainning to get my breathe to hold time up for what I need to do.
There was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it , being on opera.
But in pratice, I would do face it on , floating on the pool.
But for TV, they wanted me to upright so they could see my face, basically.
The other problem was, the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up.
So I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me.
That made me extremly nervers that raising my heart rate.
Then what they also did was which was never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor.
And it was right next to the sphere.
So everytime my heart would beat I would hear the bee-bee-bee , you know , the ticking really loud.
Which making me more nevers and there is no way to slow my heart rate down.
Normally I would start 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breathe it would drop to 12 beats per minutes which is pretty unusual.
This time it started at 120 beats and it never went down.
I spend first 5 minutes under water desperately trying to slow my heart rate down.
I was sitting there and thinking , " I've got to slow this down , I'm gonna failed , I'm gonna failed "
Then I was getting more nerves and My heart rate is just kept going up and up all the way up to 150 beats.
Basically It is the same thing that created my downfall at the Lincoin Center It was a waste of CO2.
When I made it to the halfway mark , at 8 minutes, I was one hundred percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this.
So There is no way for me to do it.
I figured that Opera dedicated an hour to doing this breathe hold thing.
If I had cracked early, it would be a whole show how depressed I am.
So I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until i black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that.
I kept pushing to 10 minutes.
At 10 minutes you started getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes.
and I knew that it was the blood shunting The blood rush away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs.
At 11 minutes, I started to feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange.
At minute 12 , I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arms going numb.
and I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack.So I started to really get really paranoid.
Then at 13 minutes maybe because of the hypochondriac, I started to feel the pain zll over my chest and it was awful.
At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe.
At 15 minutes,I was suffering major o2 deprivation to the heart.
and I started to having an ischemia to the heart.
My heart beat will go from 120 to 50, to 150 , to 40, to 20 and to 150 again.
It would skip a beat, It would start. It would stop. and I felt all this.
and I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack.
So at sixteen minutes,What I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out.
If I did have a heart attack, They would have to jump me into bling and taking my feet out and pulling me up.
So I was really nerves.
So I let my feet out and I started to floating to the top.
and I didn't take my head up.
But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop sitting there waiting.
They are doctors with the "pst" you know , so , sitting there waiting.
And then Suddenly I hear scraeming
and I think that There is some weird thing, that I had died or something had happend.
And Then I realized that I had made it to 16:32
So with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing,
And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds
As though that wasn't enough , What I did immediately after is I went to quest labs and had them take every blood symble.
that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were and the doctors could use it, once again.
I also didn't want anybody to question it and I have the world record and I have want to make sure it was a legitimate.
So I get to the New York city the next day, and a kid walks up to me.
I'm walking out the apple store , this kid walks up to me and he's like "yo, D". I'm like "yeah"
He said if you really held your breathe that long, why do you come out the water dry?
I was like "what?"
That is my life so.
As a magician I tried to show things to people that seem impossible.
And I think magic wweather I am holding my breathe or shuffling a deck of cards is pretty simple.
It's practice it's train and it's experitmenting thing while pushing through the pain to be the best I can be.
That was the magic is to me , so , thank you.
- endurance /ɪn'djʊər(ə)ns; en-/
the ability to continue doing sth painful or difficult for a long period of time without complaining 忍耐力；耐>久力- magician /mə'dʒɪʃ(ə)n/
a person who can do magic tricks 魔术师；变戏法的人- coffin /'kɒfɪn/
( especially BrE ) ( NAmE usually cas·ket ) a box in which a dead body is buried or cremated 棺材；棺椁；>棺木- pillar /ˈpɪlə(r)/
a large round stone, metal or wooden post that is used to support a bridge, the roof of a building, etc., >especially when it is also decorative 柱子，桥墩（尤指兼作装饰的）
a large round stone, metal or wooden post that is built to remind people of a famous person or event 纪念柱- hallucinate /hə'luːsɪneɪt/
to see or hear things that are not really there because of illness or drugs （由于生病、吸毒）幻听，幻视，>产生幻觉- skeptic /'skɛptɪk/
怀疑论者；怀疑者；无神论者
( NAmE )
= sceptic sceptical scepticism
( BrE ) ( NAmE skep·tic ) a person who usually doubts that claims or statements are true, especially those >that other people believe in 惯持怀疑态度的人；怀疑论者
7.obsessed /əbˈsɛst/
If someone is obsessed with a person or thing, they keep thinking about them and find it difficult to think about anything else. 受困扰的; 对…痴迷的
8.resuscitated /rɪˈsʌsɪˌteɪt/
If you resuscitate someone who has stopped breathing, you cause them to starht breathing again. 救醒
If you resuscitate something, you cause it to become active or successful again. 使复兴
9.neurosurgeon /,njʊərəʊ'sɜːdʒən/
神经外科医生
10.hypoxic /haɪ'pɒksɪk/
含氧量低的
11.shivering /'ʃɪvərɪŋ/
When you shiver, your body shakes slightly because you are cold or frightened. (因寒冷或害怕而) 颤抖
12.rebreather /riː'briːðə/
换气器；氧气呼吸器；再生式氧气系统；（水下）呼吸器
13.scrubber /'skrʌbə/
( BrE informal ) an offensive word for a prostitute or for a woman who has sex with a lot of men 婊子；淫荡女人
a brush or other object that you use for cleaning things, for example pans （刷洗用的）刷子
14.depot /ˈdepəʊ/
a place where large amounts of food, goods or equipment are stored （大宗物品的）贮藏处，仓库
15.duct-taped 布基胶带；管带
16.perflubron 全佛溴铵
17.pearl diver 潜水采珠人
18.apnea 呼吸暂停
19.deplete [ VN ] [ usually passive ] to reduce sth by a large amount so that there is not enough left 大量减少；耗尽；使枯竭
20.hyperventilating If someone hyperventilates, they begin to breathe very fast in an uncontrollable way, usually because they are very frightened, tired, or excited. 呼吸急促
21.tingling When a part of your body tingles, you have a slight stinging feeling there. 略感刺痛
22.infinite very great; impossible to measure 极大的；无法衡量的
23.duress threats or force that are used to make sb do sth 胁迫；强迫
24.metabolism the chemical processes in living things that change food, etc. into energy and materials for growth 新陈代谢
25.euphemism /'juːfəmɪz(ə)m/
an indirect word or phrase that people often use to refer to sth embarrassing or unpleasant, sometimes to make it seem more acceptable than it really is 委婉语；委婉说法
26 alliteration /əlɪtə'reɪʃ(ə)n/
the use of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words that are close together, as in sing a song of sixpence 头韵，头韵法（相连单词的开头使用同样的字母或语音）
27.convulsions /kən'vʌlʃən/
抽搐；社会动乱；哄堂大笑；震动
28.AISE/UP THE ˈANTE
o increase the level of sth, especially demands or sums of money 提高要求；增加金额
29.beaver /ˈbiːvə(r)/
an animal with a wide flat tail and strong teeth. Beavers live in water and on land and can build dams (= barriers across rivers), made of pieces of wood and mud. It is an official symbol of Canada. 河狸，海狸（水栖啮齿动物，加拿大的象征）
30.slump /slʌmp/
1). (by sth)~ (from sth) (to sth) to fall in price, value, number, etc., suddenly and by a large amount （价格、价值、数量等）骤降，猛跌，锐减
2). [ + adv./prep. ] to sit or fall down heavily 重重地坐下（或倒下）
31.legitimacy /lɪ'dʒɪtɪməsɪ/
n. 合法；合理；正统
buoyant /ˈbɔɪənt/
1.( of prices, business activity, etc. 价格、商业活动等 ) tending to increase or stay at a high level, usually showing financial success 看涨的；保持高价的；繁荣的
2.cheerful and feeling sure that things will be successful 愉快而充满信心的；乐观
3.floating, able to float or able to keep things floating 漂浮的；能够漂起的；有浮力的
extremities /iks'tremitis/
1.N-COUNT The extremity of something is its farthest end or edge. 尽头; 末端
2.N-PLURAL Your extremities are the end parts of your body, especially your hands and feet. 身体末梢
3.N-UNCOUNT The extremity of a situation or of someone's behaviour is the degree to which it is severe, unusual, or unacceptable. 极端
throb /θrɒb/
1.V-I If part of your body throbs, you feel a series of strong and usually painful beats there. 阵痛
2.V-I If something throbs, it vibrates and makes a steady noise. (有规律地) 震动作响
hypochondriac /ˌhaɪpəˈkɒndriæk/
person who suffers from hypochondria 疑病患者
paranoid /ˈpærənɔɪd/
1.afraid or suspicious of other people and believing that they are trying to harm you, in a way that is not reasonable 多疑的；恐惧的
2.suffering from a mental illness in which you wrongly believe that other people are trying to harm you or that you are very important 患偏执症的；有妄想狂的
contraction /kən'trækʃən/
1.N-COUNT When a woman who is about to give birth has contractions, she experiences a very strong, painful tightening of the muscles of her womb. 宫缩
2.N-COUNT A contraction is a shortened form of a word or words. (单词的) 缩写形式
deprivation /ˌdeprɪˈveɪʃn/
[ U ] the fact of not having sth that you need, like enough food, money or a home; the process that causes this 缺乏；贫困；丧失；剥夺
ischemia /is'ki:miə/
n. [内科] 局部缺血
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