So, I started full focus.

I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do.

But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah.

But, in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool.

But, for TV, they wanted me to be 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 real a problem for me.

That made me extremely nervous, raising the heart rate.

Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, was there was a heart-rate monitor.

And it was right next to the sphere.

So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know the ticking, really loud.  

Which was making me more nervous. And there was no way to slow my heart rate down.

Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty usual.

This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down.

I spent the first 5 minutes under water, desperately trying to slow my heart rate down.

I was just sitting there thinking, "I've got to slow this down" " I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail."

And I was getting more nervous. And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats.

Basically, it's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center. It was a waste of O2.

When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this.

There was no way for me to do it.

I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing.

If I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about 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 start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes.

And I knew that that was blood shunting, when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs.

At 11 minutes, I started 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 arm 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 hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. 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 having ischemia to the heart.

My heart beat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again.

It would skip a beat. It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this.

I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack.

So at 16 minutes, what I did was I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out,

if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up.

So I was really nervous.

So, I let my feet out, and I stated floating to the top.

And I didn't take my head out.

I was just floating there, waiting for my heart to stop, just waiting.

They had doctors with the "Pst", you know, sitting there waiting.

And then, suddenly I hear screaming.

And I think that there is something weird had happened -- that I had died or something bad had happened.

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 4 seconds.

As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after, is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample

that they could, to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it once again.

I also didn't want anybody to question it. I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate.

So, I get to New York City the next day. And this kid went up to me.

I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up me, he's like "Yo, D!" I'm like "Yeah?"

He said "If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry?"

I was like "What?"

And that's my life. So--

As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible.

And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple.

It's practice, it's training, and it's -- (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting, while pushing through the pain to be the best I can be.

That's what magic is to me, so, thank you.