BONUS: David Blaine with Rick Rubin

Published Apr 9, 2020, 9:00 AM

Rick Rubin, like all of us, has been thinking a lot about fear lately. And few people on the planet understand fear in the same way that Rick's good friend, David Blaine, does. David has made a career of pushing his mind and body to the limit. So Rick thought David might be a great person to talk to about facing fear. Ok obviously this conversation isn’t about music. But it does touch on one of Rick’s other great loves—magic. When he was a kid, Rick studied magic. Since then magic has become so much more than sleight of hand for him … he uses the idea of pulling something out of nothing when he’s making music. So it makes sense that he would turn to one of the best living magicians for words of wisdom.

To check out David Blaine's latest special visit: https://abc.com/movies-and-specials/david-blaine-the-magic-way

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Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond. Like all of us, Rick Rubin has been thinking a lot about fear lately, and few people on the planet understand fear in the same way as Rick's good friend David Blaine. David has made a career of pushing his mind and body to the limit with crazy public stunts like staying awake for sixty three hours while standing in a block of ice in the middle of Times Square, or fastened for forty four days while suspended thirty feet in the air and a plexiglass cube in London. Feeds that blew my mind growing up, So Rick thought David might be a great person for y'all to hear from about facing fear. Obviously, this conversation isn't about music, but it does touch on one of Rick's other great loves. Magic. When he was a kid, Rick studying magic, and since then magic's becomes so much more than just slight of hand for him. He uses the idea of pulling something out of nothing in his music making, so it makes sense that he would turn to one of the best living magicians for words of wisdom. In this conversation, David Blaine runs through his most legendary public stunts and explains in excruciating detail what he went through physically and emotionally at each step. He also explains his relatively simple formula for getting through physical and psychological stress. The secret, it turns out, is that we can all handle a lot more than we think. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmonds. Here's Rick Rubin and David Blaine, who connected recently on zoom. The reason that I wanted to talk to you is I'm feeling a collective fear in the air. I feel like I feel like I'm not feeling my fear so much as I'm feeling everybody's fear. That there's like a cloud of year in the air. I started thinking about different times in my life I've been afraid of something or people I know who have insights into fear. And I remember when I was learning to spend time in the ice in an ice bath that the longest I could ever stay in was a few minutes until I did it with you. And when I did it with you, your perspective on it opened my mind and helped me deal with the fear of staying longer and you talked me through it, and in that experience, it opened me up to conquer a fear. So I wanted to talk to you in general about the idea of conquering fears. Sound good, Yeah, that's great. What's uh? Tell me a little bit about your relationship to fear. Well, you know, I mean, I guess my outlook on everything was already My mother gave me this confidence as a kid. But when she was really sick, when she was dying, instead of focusing on the difficult part, of the sad part, of the painful part, she looked at the beauty and everything, so she didn't focus on herself and complaints. So she made death very poetic and very beautiful, which I think is like one of the best gifts you can give to your kid, because that immediately made me not afraid of the unknown, which is dead. But as far as I was always pushing my body to do things that were like difficult and probably dangerous since I was five years old. And here's the simple formula for it. Simple formula is you you don't just jump into the unknown. You go step by step by step by steps slowly. So if you go like if I was to say ok I'm gonna hold my breath for twenty minutes. I'd be afraid that I's gonna have cardiac I'll be dead. But you don't start like that, you said, Okay, well I did three and a half minutes, and as a kid, there's people that are free divers that have done this amount of time. Let me train with the best people. Let me slowly build a resistance or a tolerance and understand the pain that I'm going to go through so I could process it and fight it. So my outlook on the corona. And obviously I'm not a doctor, so I can't give advice. But the way I look at it is you have to do the things that you know are best. So you clean your diet up. You don't eat products that create mucus, like dairy or processed shivers or breads or things like that. You have ginger, you have garlic, You have you know, sixteen ounces of water before every anything that you drink. You keep yourself hydrated. So you do all the things that you can to really be ready for the fight. Because fear, like let's say you're anasmatic, which I was as a kid, and have a small and average lung capacity. It's scary. I think I'm corona is going to couldn't give me pneumonia types, you know, and my lungs could shut down. So what I want to do is, if I was a smoker, which I'm not, I wouldn't touch cigarettes because why do anything that can make the virus that much more you know, effective in its path to destroy you. So that's number one. Number two, as you follow all the rules, you know, don't go near people as much as you can, try to avoid contact other than the people that you're quarantined with, obviously. And then for me, the other thing that I really like to think about, which is I would say if you also study it from the point of view. And I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, it's it's just my perspective. But the reason we don't want the virus to spread as quickly as it's spreading because you don't know you have symptoms, you're not aware of it, you don't feel anything often, and you're very contagious, right, So you don't want to spread everywhere. Not that we couldn't fight it, it's just that you don't want the hospitals to suddenly become flooded, which is what's happening, and then everybody's losing the hospital beds, the respirators, and it's a shutdown. So it's not that you want to fear the virus. You want to do the right precautions to protect not even just yourself, everybody around you. So I think knowledge is basically the best way to overcome fear. Now, I was a kid, my mother the only fear she gave is when she saw not cockroaches, as would roll with them, right, but when she saw like spiders or stain bugs. Oh. So I was always afraid of like little bugs, not cockroaches, but I was afraid of every other little bug. So my magician friends would come over. We'd be brainstorm magic and like I'd see a bug and like ah, they thought I was a joe kid, right, but I wasn't. So to get over that fear, I would have people come over with bugs, insects, spiders, you know, everything, and I'd play with them. But that's temporarily getting over it. So a fluke happened and I really got over my last fear, which was an insect, certain insect. So I took my brother to Botswana, and he's the most afraid of everything, so I can't teach him how to get over that. But anyway, we go to Africa and we're in these little tents and we're with the guy who died who he was the lion Man. He goes out with the lions and he actually looks like a lion, and he brings a roll of toilet paper, no weapons, nothing, and he calls out with the wild lions and when they attack him. He could see it on YouTube. He would throw the toilet paper like fake though, and the lions would jumping away. This guy grew up in the bush with the lions, so he and hippos, he would scare them. His presence was unbelievable. But anyway, so that night after we went out with the lions and he crawls out with them and he plays with the you know them while they're eating the zebra. He's really unbelievable. But that night I went to bed and I gave my brother a night fish that I had, a really serious, high tech one, which I shouldn't have done. So he hears something walking throughout his tent and then my tent, but really mostly around his tent, and you know, I just assumed it's an elliston. I don't know. My brother looks through and it's a hippo just circling it, and he hears the hippos are the most deadly animals and that they'll just chomp through in half. Right, So my brother doesn't sleep the whole day he's just looking through this thing. And so what happened with me is balmb in this tent. I'm being careful because even if it's an elpha more right, you don't want to get anything can happened. Right. So I'm in this little tent alone and I put my phone light on and I look up and there's thousands of bugs all over the top of my tent. I'm like, okay, we're in this together. And I realize that those insects were my friends, not even joking, And from that moment onwards, I was never afraid of insects. So sometimes it is just like a fluke thing. But often I think it's like, you know, the process of trying to understand the information, to get over and to learn and to accelerate. So it's like and I also look at things as a challenge, So like even with my daughter when she takes a shower in the morning. We used to I would tell her, Okay, let's crank it the cold, you know, and I just want her so when all of her friends won't go on the ocean because the ocean's gold or our family, she goes right in. And it's just the mindset of like, I can overcome this, you know. So it's like and that translates across the board. So whether you're running as hard as you can or holding your breath, or you know, it's standing up in one place for seventy three hours, things like that that you have to endure slowly, build a tolerance, have an understanding of what you're really doing, do the research, study with the smartest people that you can, and and and that's the best way to you know, I think, to work on facing the fear in the most diligent and efficient way. How do you deal with the when you're in it. I'll give you an example. One time I was bodysurfing in Venice with a mutual friend of ours and the waves are getting big and it seemed normal at first, and then the waves you're getting bigger and bigger, and it was a pretty big day to begin within the ways, we're getting bigger, and we're out next to a pier, and then the waves started crashing over the pier, like really big, and I remember our friend looking at me and saying, you know, it keeps feeling like this, We're going to be in trouble. And that was the last thing he said, and then he was gone. And then I'm sort of in the drop zone and just waves are crashing on me and came really close to the ground, and I remember thinking, I know, the worst thing I can do is panic. So I know panic panic will only hurt in this situation. But when you're being held under water by waves, or when you come up for a breath and a wave crashes you, even there's a conversation that goes on between I know I'm not supposed to panic, that this isn't going to help me, and the other voices there's nowhere we're panicking. It's hard to control. I think, you know, number one rule of the twenty one laws of the samurais accept everything exactly the way it is. And I think even in the worst situation, when you panic and go crazy and let it over, you won't you won't win that battle. So you kind of have to accept what the situation is and then in a very careful and clever way to try to outremovering it, but without fighting it, because you're never going to be the ocean, so so you have to kind of smooth into it and have the faith that you can be under for a little more than you think. You can't even relax and kind of go with it a little bit, which is the only option. But have you ever had that come up, like in the midst of a challenge. Have you had it come up of what do I do now? Every time I'm holding my breath for a really long breath hold, my heart gets really weird and it does these strange things, and that makes you get more focused on the heart and it doesn't help. So I've learned over the years, even when pushing to the extreme, you just accept it and go with it. So you know that that's the best thing that I've learned. When I'm pushing to those extreme places and it gets a little out of control, Let's talk about each one of the things that you've done, and then in each case, what were the most difficult moments? So you know, so when I did the first stunt was buried alive. It was one dni die before you have the chance to do. And Bill Colluse, you know, said, yeah, you can go to Central Park bury yourself. You'll sneak out and then you'll come back a month later. And so what's the point of that, Like, what's the fun of that. I'm gonna really do it, And instead of doing it under dirt like the Fakirs used to do it, I'll just do it in a sea through boxes. I was thinking, like, you know, I've seen my mom laying a bed not moving for a very long period of time. I can at least lay in a little coffin for a week. And I was right. And I'd also rented Artha, so I had fasted as a kid. I had done you know those things, so I understood that that's all doable. So I had fasted for a week before buried a life, just to clean everything out because I knew I wasn't able to go to the bathroom. I'll bet the number two and the whole thing. And I put a coffin in Bill's living room where I was. I was sleeping in his pants room buying his kitchen at the time, and I put a coffin in his living room that I got in Queens, and I started practicing. I'd just sleep in the coffin. I was like, yeah, this isn't so hard. And I would stay there for a couple of days and I learned how to pee into one of those little bag whatever. I did the whole process, and I was clean, systems clean, ready to go, stunts about to stunts about to start, and I was clean. Just water. Bill that type of thinking it doesn't make sense to him. So he's like, here, have this, and he gives me a drink that was called a Mango Mama. So I don't know why I listened to Me's like take this. I was like, Bill, I don't think. So he's like, hey, you'll just pee it out because I had a fuckerstup to pee. So I drink the Mango Baba and I do my first big stunt. I get buried alive in the middle of New York. So you see through the whole thing in no way out for a week right away, like eight hours later, I'm like, oh no, and I have to go to the bathroom. But a number two and rick for a week, I had to hold it in it was the warms anyway anyway, But you know, it's fine. So I do the stunt, you know, and it was difficult and all that stuff, but that one getting used to it. Things that you don't think about. It's like, how am I going to do a number one? There's people staring at me the whole time, day, night. It became really crowded. So it's it's like when people are looking at you around the clock and you have to pee, it's difficult. You don't think about those things when you're practicing in the coffin by yourself, right, So what I would have to do at the beginning, so I would close my eyes and I would just pretend I was in front of the bathroom. It would take me like an hour and I'd be able to do the you know, take a number one again, no number two the whole time. But then eventually, by like day three, I'd be waving and smile wing and be like no but so no, but so the buried alive. But that's done. I did it, and I always look at it. It's like I could do that like nothing like easy tomorrow. So okay. So the next stunt was the block of ice training for that, I would get in ice bass all the time. How do you get the idea for it? First of all, after buried alive, I was like on an airplane, like from coming back from somewhere really nice, and I just started thinking about an insect in a piece of ember, like how cool that looked the whole thing, And I was like, maybe I could do something like that with like a big piece of ice and then put it in the middle of New York. So I looked frozen in the block of ice, and obviously it would be cut around me two pieces. So step one was I went to an ice locker and just got in the ice locker to see how much I could endure, which is a nightmare. It wears you down quickly. Step two was I built an ice igloo, just blocks of ice together like a regular ice car or put it together, and I was like, oh, this isn't so bad because the ice is against you, but it's enough away that it's actually like an igglue effect, so you could handle it. Now. When I did the real block of ice, I got the ice from an iceberg in a lassus. It was frozen and cold a temperature, so it's really see through did that block of ice when we brought it in. There was a couple of things I hadn't prepped for at all that you know, those unknown things that you don't think about. Number One, it keeps dripping on you over and over, which is kind of a weird form of just drives you out of your mind. Number Two, you can't fall asleep because if you lean into the ice, you get frostbite and you'll ket to cut off that part of your face whatever it is. Number Three, standing up for that entire duration sixty three hours. I practiced it, leaning and stuff like that, but not for that length of time. And then the only thing that was to my advantage was it was November twenty seventh to November twenty nine, two thousand, and it was a warm November, so the air that was coming through was you know, sixty eight degrees, which created the drop, but it also really kept it not so bad. Of course, the ice was raided. Now, the worst part of it that I could have never thought about at that time was sleep deprivation plus torture, meaning standing out the entire time, nothing to lean on, the ice radiating the cold against you put you in an hallucinatory state because you're trying to sleep, because your body knows to build the immune system and to function me to sleep, but you can't go to sleep because you know if you go to sleep, it's going to be really bad. So while you're in the situations like I can stay awake right now for five days if I had a few people helping, but in that situation, very very difficult. What happens is your brain touches into your worst spears. So your brain goes into whatever you're most afraid of and it puts that all over you. So I started seeing spiders crawling all over my body and all these weird things because your brain is trying to trick the other part of your will that's trying to stay awake to make you go to sleep, and you don't go to sleep, you start having dreams and nightmares, but your eyes are completely open. So my eyes were wide open, and I was having this insane hallucinogenic dream like wallawake steak, but not knowing if it was a dream or if it was fake. And your brain is slipping away, and the only thing that can get you along, I think is I had support from a couple of people that I loved and trusted, and they're like, you're gonna be okay, and it was enough for me to think that maybe they were right. When the guy started cutting through the ice of the chainsaw, I tried to grab the chainsaw. I didn't know. I didn't know what it was. And you know that one because of the sleep up provision. I always say I would never ever do that again. Ever. By the way, little things that go wrong is you have a catheter which is like a trucker's tube, which is like a condom with a tube coming off of it. One of the PA's working on the stunt didn't know and he was vacuuming underneath the water thing and he hit that hose and like, oh, you know, but your brain is already on a So it's it's like exaggerated big time. I'll give you one example of what happened, so you know, it was twenty four to seven in time squares, so people, I mean three days, but people could continuously come day and night and somebody was in front of you. I mean it was always crowded. But one of the people you lock onto me, you feel comfortable. So one of the people was passing by, I went, like, what time is it? It was like, you know, it was day three, the last day that it was supposed to tend to round ten o'clock or something like that. It's like, what time is it? And he said he went, I think it was like around and four for something. So he went four oh five. So I'm like, okay, four or that means I have about six more hours. I think, okay, I can do this. So I wait for as long like I wait for hours because I don't want to ask that question again. After waiting for hours, I look at and I go, what time is it? And it's the same guy And I didn't even realize that, and he goes four oh six. Of like, but you know, the Native American India, a lot of people use sleep deprivation, but in a controlled environment to go to that hallucinogenic dream light state. And it is incredible because there is a part of it that's like one of my favorite journeys I've ever taken. Not recommended to anybody ever, but there is a part of it that's like, wow, you know, were you were you able to explain what you were seeing and feeling the whole time? Everything voices talking to through people appearing in the ice, everything that you can imagine that you're dreaming of, just and just everything goes through your mind, your body, and it's it's hyper real. It's it's it's like having dreams but you're awake and nightmares. Have you do you have cameras on you the whole time? Yeah? Yeah, I was scared the whole time. Have you ever gone back when you look at it, it's scary. My eyes are like really really really, it's scary scary footage. Yeah, you saim wondering how much of your perception was what was actually happening? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, are there things that you imagine that happened that didn't? Yeah, for sure, But but like lots of people like my brother, my best friend Josie, people that were there were looking at me and they knew that this was this was not me. It was pretty scary. But at the same time, when I reflect back, I would never do that one again. But there's something about that part of it. It was like one of the most incredible and scary but beautiful states that I've ever been in. We'll be right back with more of Rick's conversation with David Blaine. We're back with Rick Rubin and David Blaine. So what was the one after the ice? After the ice was two thousand oh Vertigo when I stood on the pillar two thousand and two and Brian Park, which once again, you know, we had these old things to handle things that would come up and I was able to hold it. Wasn't that tough that one. I still started to hallucinate just because I didn't I think standing up in one place for a long time, plus the stress of the body not sleeping and all that stuff. You were up really high, probably like ninety feet. I wanted it to be a hundred and then I trained to jump, which was my favorite part ever, jumping one hundred foot into cardboard boxes which not into an air bag, you know, which was my favorite part. But I trained them was so specific and knew I was going to jump off and exactly hit the mark. But because I had a mic on and they opened it so I couldn't tell. Everybody stopped with adding these boxes and they all got freaked out because the buildings behind me when I would look because I was hallucinating, they started to look like animal heads. So I would see like a lion, and I was like, wow, I didn't know those buildings were shaped like lions. And they'd be like, they're not. Then they thought I was. They thought I wasn't going to jump into the box likes that made this huge thing and anyway, so that kind of upset me, but that's all right. The other one upset me was on the Drown the Live I Want. I said, no matter what, if I don't get to the record, you guys, do not pull me out, period, because I want to go for the record. And it like I cracked early and I started black I'm about to black out, and one of my best friends was in the front and he yells get out because he was so freaked out. So they jumped in and pulled me out before I got to like the number because the number is what's important to me, you know, and all the stunts, the numbers are so important. Oh and that's part of it also, is if you use numbers, like use numbers to get there, like, oh, I'm gonna quate this, so I'm gonna do I'm gonna get to halfway. The I'm gonna get to halfway, I'm gonna go backwards and I have this much and this much and then eight them and you start working it backwards by numbers, and it really helps. So even when I'm running like training, if I'm running around the loop at Central Park, you know the six point two miles. But what I do is, I'll I count the steps, so I'm like, okay, it's actually forty four hundred right feet steps. I would count the steps to get around and then you can keep going because it's a number scap so you can get halfway start to count again. So that that's another thing that helps me get focused. As numbers. Yeah, it's really interesting with numbers. I have a technique that i'll i'll share with to prolong things and I find that it works in um you can do it with when you're exercising, but I also use it when I'm in the ice tub. Let's say I can do forty slow breaths when I'm in the ice Yeah, forty slow breaths is like on a typical day, maybe five between five and six minutes. And if you change the way you count. Instead of counting every breath is one death, now I count, I use the number one for each of the first four breaths, and then I use the number two for the next four breaths. Yeah, yeah, And it's great. And after you've done it for a while, getting to the number forty and if you don't allow yourself to do math, which is a real key to it, you can't allow yourself to figure out what it is. But something about keeping the numbers lower even though you're doing it longer in your mind, Yeah, you haven't been in that long. There's part of you, the brain part of it doesn't kick in a feeling like you're getting towards the end. So it's good. It's a good technique. And if you really think about it's like, even when we push it at the highest level, we're only pushing like forty percent. So if you really max out, you're like sixty percent. You know, a hypothetical ustimated numbers. But the max out would be your breaking point, right, So, but which nobody ever gets to. But I'm saying so, if you can trick your brain, you can override your body and deal with the pain of wanting to quit or shut down by fooling yourself. That's exactly what I do. Don't You don't You're not as aware of how hard it is, so soon it takes away one of the rick. That's how I do everything everything. And by the way, the only other thing that I add to it is I never stop at the mark. I always have to go at least one over always, because you train yourself to never quit before you get to the goal. I have a lot of friends. They'll run like, oh, let's run a five k, and they'll stop at three miles. I'm like, you just have to go that little extra bit, you got it, and then go more because someone you have to do the real task. You have that in your mind, like I'm not gonna quit until I not just get there, but pass it. So it's a numbers game. Okay, So now we're up to the So you've done the pillar and you say it's easy, but still standing on your feet for how many hours? Was it? That was only thirty six hours. You were standing ninety feet in the air. So there's the yeah, high train for that. Put a flower pot. I lived on the sixteenth floor of a building in New York. I just put a flower pot in the little corner of the roof and just stand there all the time, just stare down. That was it. So I just, oh I could. It's like, let's say you had to do it, if you had to stand up on a book, what's the big deal you have to stand up on a book for you could do it right. So it's just that if that book is up one hundred feet it changes your brain. But really, if you're committed to I'm gonna stand on this platform for thirty six hours, you're just you're just canmitting to it. So then you have to override the brain's impulses and you know, oh this is too much. You just gotta figure So I just built I built that one up slowly. I'll just stand on flower pots on the top of the roof. By the way, from one time the flower pots shattered on the top of that was crazy. What's after the pillar? That was two thousand and two and two thousand and three, I went to London to forty four days in a box that one. Once again, I probably pushed it a little too much. But once you get over that point, once you get where you lose all temptation, all sense, you know everything that all of your dopea means you're adorned, everything goes away and you're just on this sort of steady serotonin level where everything you start to see colors like you've never imagined st blue. It's like you cry when you see like wow, when you see somebody smile, just a stranger, you both cry. It's like it's this connective state where you have no It's like you enter the spiritual and you completely leave the flesh behind. And that that is a Yeah, that's that's an experience, one of the most important, other than everything related to my door, but that's one of the most important experiences in my life. Do you attribute it to the fact that you weren't in the other ones we're talking about, there's you're more uncomfortable, there's more of a sense of pain. This one, the forty four days, was more just about the duration than the discomfort. I think, is that right? I mean you start to feel pain. Basically, if you read any book about extended fasting, it kind of hits the notes. It's like it about a month or twenty eight days, you really do you start to have this sweet taste in your mouth. So I was drinking water the whole time, but around day twenty eight I started questioning harmony and everybody there. It's like Bill, I was like I would pour the water because I had to, but it was pure h to us, so it was like no minerals, no nothing in it. And I would have a tube come down and I would drink it. I think that like the people that supported this in London, my Channel four, I was thinking, they must want this to keep going. So they're spiking my water with glucose, you know, I tasted. I'd make Harmony band build my brother. I'd pour the water down to my say taste this right now. They're sugar in it. Pour it down, they drink it, you know, and I think that they were all in on it. So I'd get like a random stranger. I'd say, bring him all the way up, do you have a copy the cup? And then I'd pour the water down the catch it the cup and taste is it water? So all the guide put things of what happens during the fast, it really did actually happen exactly. The information I had on how long I could do it for came from a physiologist at NASA, so he was you know, they want to protect the astronauts, so they do all the due diligence, all the research. They look into the terrible records from World War two, things that most people wouldn't go into morally, it's rang or ethically, so he would really just to save nastro outsized say okay, how long can he human actually go without food? How long can you human go with just water? And they had really accurate specific notes of what could be tolerated. And it pretty much worked out exactly as I had assumed it. And what was it? What were the most difficult parts of that? So many amazing things happened. I have to say, if I was doing that fast by myself, it would have been impossible, which is why I put it in public, so public, all sides visible. I knew I would just have to do it. There's no cheating because you're you're as exposed as it gets. But if I was trying to do it by myself, forget it. But the only real difficulties is little things that you don't think about. Like after that amount of time, even though I had fasted and cleaned out my system, your body is processing, and you know I helped. I held there was barely, but I helped the number two and for the entire time, obviously most of at least through sweat and through your breath and all that stuff. But and then you you override it and then you don't have to go over again. But that duration of that and then the only other real real difficulty I think was as you start to become really weak, your you know, your body goes into this sort of like you're very stable almost you're very you know, minimalistic and all that stuff, but your heart's moving differently because I guess from you know, you're you're you're eating, you start to eat your organs, and my bone mass and VEX decrease thirty troops. And also and then what happens, you know, the London nurse, not the lone, the media blue you know, start to make this supporting forty four days in this let's make this a story. So people would like fly like toy helicopters or cheeseburgers on them around But that's been bother me. But what would happen is people would like it in the middle of a night, like shoot pink balls at the box and it was really cool looking, you know, it's like this color month, but it was like that noise because you don't think about that the way it echoes. I wake up to that you know, so that kind of thing just is a little crazy. But that's not the difficult part. Difficult part is I think around day thirty seven when I started to get the heart started to feel like it was gonna it wasn't right right because it's decreased in size by a third or whatever it is that it lost, and we have those records. Just afterwards, I went to the hospital. We had the New England Journal, Medicine, Oxford Journal. We studied all the stuff. I gave the results, you know, the science, just because most people that do these things are like striking or hunger strikes. But anyway, so around that time, around day thirty seven, day thirty eight, the heart starts to going. It starts to get really really difficult because you think that you're going to collapse. You know, you get dizzy everything you do, any movement. And and my mother passed away when I was young. But um, before she died, she said to me, God is loved. That was that was the last words that she said. And she died in my arms. It was like, I said, the most difficult and most beautiful that she could have given me. But um, so it around that exact time, I was like I said in my head, I said, mom, if you think I should keep going, give me a sign. And Rick, the tower bridge was in front of me. Over there, these kids start young. Damn, damn, I see them right when I said that. In my head, I'm saying that exact moment. And they have a rolled up white thing, right, and they open it up and they start walking down towards me. When they get close to me, they keep open up. They open it all the way. They're holding it, like three of them, I think, and it says God is loved. I was like, yeah, I started crying, you know. But so that and then you know those kind of signs is simple. You know, are coinsida, whatever it is that's enough to keep going, or if you know, or if the energy esus out there, and you know, energy is never just so something she put out there that just happened to connect at the right moment, you know, those types of things. So I kept going and pushed to the end, and you know that was but like I said, it was. And so it's like when you get the chance in the vertigo I had it too, in the box, when you get the chance to just really watch the sun go up, go over the sky. Watch it the whole way up, watch it the whole way down, and all the way around. Watch the river go up and down. It's amazing. It's funny that we never get to do that in real life. And then as soon as I was done with the stunt, I was in the hospital recovering. You know, somebody sent me a box from Harrods of food and I shouldn't have eaten for a couple of weeks because that's the most dangerous part. It's the refeeding syndrome, which is the paper that we published was about that. As soon as the doctor, who thought I was also cheating, by the way, and Bill wanted me to take glucose vitamins with sugar, said no, Bill, and I was right because my body did go into starvation mode, so it was in the metabolic great change to protect me. But anyway, so as soon as I started that, like taking from the box, taking the crisp and eating you know, the bagels, that would as soon as you do that, the animal state returns. Everything changes and then it's like your note, the spiritual part of it, which is the most amazing part, fades away very fast. So you go from like this this state of like pure there's no body, there's nothing, the colors, the wind, the sky, the sun, the earth, and then back into the you know the normal world. So it is something that I wish like everybody could experience on because it is. And I think that's why those yogis and monks, why they do those bomb fasts, because they find that place where serotonin is riding their rain levels. There's no one darkness, there's no dopamines. It's just a solid, steady stay and you and you find something that you could never you could never imagine or explain it. So what was after the box? After the glass box two thousand and three, After that was the drowned a lot the water thing. That was my favorite one by far, just the favorite across the board. I started holding my breath when I was five years old. I was on the swim team. At my feet turned in you know, single mother Brooklyn Ymca, all the kids beating me instead of swimming like normal like them, because when you have to turn hit, I would just swim straight and I suddenly I'm able to keep up because I'm not breathing. So then I start going back and forth and I start really as Wow, I could do it, and the coaches, I don't do that. It's like, I can do it. And I did do it. And then the older kids would come to see me do laps about breathing. That was kind of like that, and then they would compete against me. So going water and I beat them all the older older kids. So I'd say, listen, you can go up and down as many times as you want. I'll stay under the whole time. So I was able to while they went up and down. I was able to last like six of theirs. But they didn't know the tech me. You know, going up and down and doing that, it's not as efficient. It's just staying calm, right, which is what I was doing. So the breath hole began there and then I loved it. And then I discovered Houdini at that age as well. I was reading his books and he was the underwater King. He had a record of three and a half minutes, so young teen, I was able to do three and a half minutes, no problem. I'd get out of the pool and blackout. By the way, he didn't know that that's what was going on. And then had the idea of putting a spear shape the aquarium in the middle of Lincoln Center and just living there like the human aquarium type then, but like it's like a yeah, just a ball in the middle of New York. Then seeing how long I stay. So it was all so the longest that somebody would submerged underwater continuously, it was seven days. So I spoke to a guy that had the record that lived under a lake and he gave me all the tips and text He stayed under the boy for like five days, and he's like, here's what you need to do. So I kind of listened to him, studied what he was saying, and then yeah, I just did it. Didn't anticipate what would happen to the hands and feet that you know, it's pretty the pain is pretty intense because all the oils that protect you leave and then you know, the wrinkled that extraordinarily, you know, beyond anything conceivable that that's and the pain that comes with it with them being that wrinkled and just some expansion and all that stuff is crazy. But um, drinking liquids through a two you know, stayed there seven Oh. Another thing you didn't anticipate sun that spears like a magnifying glass, big piece of glass filled water. Son's going to it actually burned a hole in the metal walkway. It was so I was in there for a week. My back was burnt, but like not just burnt like red, I mean like like burnt, like burnt burnt. And it stayed like that for like seven months or something. You know, it's just like, yeah, it was, and the pain it's just insane, but you don't think about those things, and you're on water, so it kind of and the gates it on some level. Until after where did where did you end up with the breath holding? Uh? Well I did actually with oxygen, I did twenty minutes in two seconds, and just straight breath holding. I had gotten up to seven forty seven. The record was nine o eight. You can get the guy had a huge advantage over me, not that that matters, but he was very skinny, very tall tom Zetis, you know, and and and his lung capacity, his total lung capacity was almost double Line who was pretty extraordinary Sonny. But that doesn't matter, you know. But anyway, I thought somehow, what I thought was by living in this sphere, which is why I decided to do the sphere before it by living there would acclimate become condition. But also I thought that by not eating for that amount of time, metabolic rate would slow down and suddenly I'd be able to hold my breath much longer. That's what I was hoping for, But it doesn't really well. I started cracking at seven away, so it doesn't really work like that. Then I went back trained to pure oxygen. Hypothetical record at that time was ten minutes. There was no real visuals on it, so I just started training just static acting of breath holding with oxygen. So and then I got my first try, and I had a bunch of friends there that were top narrow bascular surgeons and doctors pulmonaris, and when they saw that I was under for fifteen minutes or nothing, they pulled me out because in their mind it's like the body can endure that. That's not possible. And I was like, why did you do that? I was fine and came in with pulmonary expert with telemetry and everything attached. I had done a twenty minute and two se I can breath hold before the OPRAH one, which was seventeen oh four twenty minute and two second breath hold. Heart rate dropped to eight beats curve minute and they'd never seen that, and so they pulled me out once again. I was like, why did you do that? They were like, because you were about to go into cardiac at cardiac death, I was like, perfectly fine. The body does things, it adjusts, it adapts, and I don't know if there's something to just accepting the situation and riding it through the Alps, but it was. It was pretty amazing. And so when I had to do the world record, which Tom Zetis pushed it right before I did. He went on Regius and Kelly and pushed it to sixteen thirty two from a hypothetical thirteen. So I was like, okay, I got to nail this. So when I got to twenty or two, I felt like when I do Oprah, I'd be okay. Getting to the seventeen past sixteen thirty two. In a long breath hold, what are the phases of what's going on? Mentally? You want to ideally it sounds silly, but you want to keep your eyes closed. You want to do it. Your brain takes a lot of energy, so you want to kind of minimize on everything just to preserve o' too. So you want to shut everything down as much as possible. What I do is I just I used to go through the alphabet, go to the names, visit all different places, absorbed, drift under the ocean, going to the abyss of the ocean, and just kind of go all over. Then when so when I did it on stage and stuff like that in my show, I didn't do that. I move, I go upside down. But going upside down I realized because Zudini used to do it upside down, and I realize why, I think while he was doing it is because if you think about the way mammals that are underwater creatures, they big breath and they die this way. So if you think about it, when you're upside down head first, your lungs aren't forcing the air out. They're forcing it's that position the air is going into lung So it's like by being upside down, it is a much easier position to hold your breath. The only problem is getting there takes a little bit of energy and then getting out of it. But when I'm upside down in the water tank, I can kind of relax and almost go to sleep. Not go to sleep, I mean go to that place you know, so what was the last one. Well after that, when I got really cocky and my trainer working on it, It's like, you can never do a stunt that you didn't prepare for. You need to do it and understand what you're doing. I did this upside down thing, and I figured I had done, like, you know, six hours upside down. I was like, I could do sixty hours this. As soon as I go upside down, I'm up to six hours. I didn't try peeing upside down for the first time. Pee It's like, oh, you know, nightmare, I'm upside down. And anyway, that that one was a disaster, public disaster. Then I shut down for a long time. I did something after that with the electricity where I was in a Tesla coil seventy three hours standing up, which was really hard because the expansion of the ankles started to riff through the metal chain mail Faraday suit that I was wearing. And you know, one time and I had electrolyte water I was drinking and when I spit it out, the arc hit it the water one and just blasted into my heart and even I think I burn marks on my toes. So that that one was a really really difficult one, and that's the last one I did. My daughter was born. I was like, I'm not doing anything anymore like this, and I'm done. So I just went kind of back to, you know, the magic stuff. But something I've been working on has been that has been so fun and amazing. Right now, it's obviously, you know, we're just working it out and dreaming about it, playing with it and thinking about it. But there is one that I love that's the opposite. It's not about you know, survival, and it's more about the opposite end of that's more about poetry and beauty and you know things like that, hopefully, right. But still even in the shows that I've seen, I've seen you do stuff when you still end up, you know, being in a tank of water for a really long time. Right, Well, yeah, I mean I can't. Yeah, I love those things. I love and to me, because oh, how's that magic? To me? That's the real magic. Like to me, it's like the body's capable of doing things that we can't even imagine that the body could, withstand ard do that's magic. A human can go without air for twenty minutes and two seconds or now the records twenty four minutes and three seconds. That's magic. How does the body do that? Any of the things that you've done, Just think about any techniques or anything that you've learned that are helpful in terms of people who are facing a struggle. I think rule number one is accept everything just the way it is. So that's rule number one, and then try everything in your power to understand and to solve for what the best possible approach to fixing the situations. I think a lot of it starts with like correcting little things that you can manage yourself. Beautiful cool man, Thank you for telling me stories, do Rick. Thanks again to David Blaine for jumping on a zoom call with Rick. David's latest special, The Magic Way, aired on ABC early this month. Check out ABC dot com for details. Brooken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell, mil LaBelle, Leah Rose, Matt Laboza, and Martin Gonzalez Pushkin Industries. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.

Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

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