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Comment by jimothyhalpert7 | Hacker News Reader

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 minutes - https://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_...

I don't know why, but reading that video transcript makes me feel a bit physically sick. The thought of deliberately holding ones breath for so long goes against every basic natural instinct I have. An extraordinary achievement.

Indeed extraordinary, especially considering that the static apnea world record is 11 min 35 sec.

To clarify: I'm totally calling bullshit on his claim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving#AIDA_recognized_wor...

I'm very glad someone brought this up. The whole talk is kind of weird. David is extremely nervous, drinking all the time, and then (spontaneously) bursts into tears in the end. One comment read that he was 'high', and, while there's no way (or point) to verify this, it describes his abnormal nervousness pretty well.

Adding to this the fact that this achievement hasn't been verified, leads to a very strange TED Talk.

So, I started wondering, whether a deliberately bad TED talk can be considered a good magic trick...?

That's the record for static apnea on regular air. After breathing up with pure o2, you can push the limits quite a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_apnea

The accreditation for _most_ of the records with the pure oxygen is from Guinness. I'm really not at all convinced by that.

The highest record with pure oxygen that's recognised by AIDA is at 16:32. That's half a minute under what Blaine claims. So, still, not convinced.

The catalan Aleix Segura is the current static apnea World Champion. He won the title last June in a competition in Belgrad with an astonishing apnea time of 10min 07sec

A month ago he went for the pure show and broke the Guiness Record by using pure oxygen. Breathold time: 24min 03sec.

A video of that perfomance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L89kY5ewgqU

For an apnea aficionado like me it's a pleasure listening Aleix talk about trainings, chemistry, physics or dietetics. A shame he has not made any talks for the great public because this guy has a lot information to share. Is quite strange that no general media has ever approached him yet. At least not as far as I know.

Not a good place to die suddenly.

I max out at 1min20. (edit: 2min00 woo)

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