Camp Gagnon - Free Diver's NEAR-DEATH Experience 250ft Underwater

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

William Trubridge, a world-record-setting free diver talks about his near-death experiences, how to overcome anxiety with breath-work, and why diving is more exhilarating than drugs. WELCOME TO CAMP.Thanks to Morgan & Morgan for sponsoring today's episode!Mark Gagnon is our HostWill Schwartz is our Content Producer and Lead EditorAce Taylor provides Additional EditingSpencer Weinstein is our Community ManagerKostis Zacho is our Clips Editor

I blacked out at 42 meters out of reach of the safety diver. He didn't even see me. He came down to 30 meters. Couldn't see me. I already started to fall back down. So he went back up to the surface. Then he activates the counterbalist, and it takes a long time for the plate to come back up.

Then it catches me and brings me to the surface. So I fell from 130 down to 250 feet. At that point, I'd been under the water for almost seven minutes. It was about a minute before I started breathing again. Then this thought pops into my mind. This could be the last breath you're going to take. This is William Trubridge, one of the greatest free divers in the world. In 2016, he swam 335 feet straight down in one single breath,

breaking the world record for the deepest finless free dive. And today, we're going to talk about why free diving gives a better high than drugs, how anyone can use breathwork to stop anxiety and fear, and the time he almost died 100 feet underwater in the middle of the ocean. Every week, we are dropping the most interesting conversations on the internet right here at Camp Gagnon. Don't miss it. Hit the subscribe button right here. Now, enjoy my conversation with William Trubridge. Welcome to camp.

Will Truebridge. Did I pronounce that correctly? You did. Okay, nice. All right. I'm really excited to talk to me. This is like, I've been looking forward to this. This is going to be really cool.

Free diving, for me at least, I didn't really know anything about it prior to researching. I just knew that there was, it was like this death-defying feat where you go down, you come back up. But I didn't understand the specifics and the mental sort of like meditative focus that goes into doing what you've done. obviously multiple world record holder you know creating techniques practices you have a training regiment that I don't really think people in free diving have done prior to you

there's so many things that you've done for the sport that I think is really really impressive that I want to get into but first can you sort of just explain to like a casual person like myself what free diving is why it's significant and sort of like the different sub strata

of free diving that people can fall into Yeah, so its essence is it's just breath hold diving. And there's two ways of doing that in the pool where you hold your breath as long as you can, just motionless. That's called static apnea. Apnea means breath hold. Or swimming laps underwater as many laps as you can on one breath. They call it apnea. That's just when you just are holding your breath.

Yeah, it comes from Greek apnea without breath. Ah, this is like sleep apnea. Similar, yeah. So yeah, it's breath holding. But what I specialize in is the depth disciplines where we're going as deep as you can on one breath. And there's a few of those, but the kind of my passion, the purest one, is without fins, where it's just you swimming down as far as you can with just your hands and your feet to blow you. And you're not holding the rope.

There is a rope with you, but you're not grabbing it or anything like that until you flip. It's just a reference. Yeah. You can use it once at the bottom to turn around. But other than that, you can't touch it or pull on it. And so there's substrata where people use fins to go down. And then there's also where people use like a sled, right? Yeah, the sled one has kind of become more obsolete.

Oh, really? It's more of a stunt. Back in the 70s, 80s, I don't know if you've seen a movie called The Big Blue. I think so. Is that the Brazilian, dude? There was a French and an Italian guy. The Frenchman is played by Jean-Renaud. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that movie is based around the sled disciplines, which was kind of big back then. But now no one really does it anymore. It's just kind of a stunt. Like a novelty. Yeah. Got it. So it's not, oh, that's interesting. Because in my mind, that's the one that's the most popular.

Where it's like, that's what is like the thing. Because I guess you get the greatest depths when you're slide diving. You get the biggest number, but it's actually not athletic because all you're doing is just holding onto a sled. You're just getting kind of dunk like a tea bag as deep as you can. As long as you can equalize your ears, then as a breath hole, it doesn't take very long because the sled moves so fast. Oh, interesting. So have you ever done a sled to die?

Was that interesting to you? Yeah, I've done them. They're fun, but I've never kind of like trained it or pursued it. Sure. Okay. And you specifically like Finless because that is, I think you mentioned this in another conversation, but it's the most pure. It's the most stripped down. And I'm curious about your pursuit of that specific discipline.

Yeah, the way I see it is it's the purest definition of human aquatic potential. Because if you think of human speed, who do you think of? The fastest man. You're saying ball. Yeah, you don't think of the guy on the bike, right? Yeah. Even though they go a lot quicker. So it's just the human body, how fast can that go?

Right. And underwater with depth, unassisted, free diving is how deep can the human body go on one breath? And then your assent is not assisted. with anything. Your assent is also just you kicking. Yeah. Kicking and pulling with your hands as well. So you're swimming base, it looks like breaststroke on the surface, except that the arms move further. They come all the way to your sides. Like it's a bigger stroke. Oh, wow. Okay. And then I guess that the other discipline is if you're using the rope to pull yourself. Yeah. And then there's also with fins as well in which most athletes use a monophon,

like a big mermaid's tail. Okay, cool. And that's obviously a bigger propulsive area. So you can a lot deeper. Oh, interesting. Okay, so you're completely sort of unrestricted by everything else. You're not using any type of AIDS and you hold the world record for the deepest finless descent. Correct? That's 102 meters. Yeah. AKA I know we're talking about this before. We're like, we're using Imperial here only. So 331 feet. So that's like a football field. Yeah. Pretty much. A football field straight down and then straight back up. Yeah. Insane. The thing is true. insane. I don't think a lot of people that, like, if you didn't grow up around water or like swimming a lot, I don't know if people truly understand the stakes of that type of feet.

And I think a lot of casual people would be like, all right. But think about, like, I grew up with a pool and it was like maybe 10 or 15 feet. And you get down to the bottom and your ears are hurting. It's hard to descend. Like your chest kind of gets compressed a little bit. it's extremely difficult to go 15 feet. And then the idea of going 10 times that, 15 times, it's truly insane. So the stakes of going down to that depth. Can you talk about sort of the danger and the risk associated with it?

Obviously, you know, you're at the bottom of the ocean. But what are the other things that are happening mentally and physically as you're descending to 300 feet? Yeah, there's a lot because it's physically, it's unlike any other sport. So the lungs are compressed to, a volume of at that depth, like the volume of a tennis ball. And we don't normally, like even if you do a full exhale now, your lungs will contain kind of a few liters of air still in them.

So we don't encounter that kind of lung volume in our day-to-day lives at all. So being able to accommodate that pressure change and being able to still bring air up into your ears and sinuses to equalize. Do you know how many pounds that is roughly? Pounds of pressure like PSI. Yeah. Or kilos or whatever you people use. Yeah.

I can't remember off the top of my head. It's a lot more than what is in your car tire. Like your car tire is 35 PSI, I think. Yeah. And I feel like it's over 100 PSI or more. So the pressure on your body, yeah, is... A few hundred pounds. Like just imagine a few hundred pounds, maybe even a thousand pounds,

just on your chest, just sitting there. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's quite a thousand, but it's quite a bit. You don't feel like it's not like you have like the weight of an elephant on your body or anything like that. You only feel the effects on the air volumes in your body, which is in your lungs and in your head. And if you're not flexible, like if you can't kind of accommodate that, that pressure and the change in volume, then something's going to break internally. So we get blood flowing into the lungs and then when you come to the surface, you'll be splitting up or coughing up.

blood in a minor case or it can be worse than that as well. So that's obviously if you're not adapted, if you're not trained for it. That's one of the risks, but it's not the biggest one. The biggest one is obviously going to be running out of oxygen at some point during the dive. And if you're kind of close to the limit, then you're going to run out of oxygen at the very end of the dive where your safety divers are all around you and they can bring you to the surface and support you. And it's actually not as dangerous as it sounds because even if you black out,

then you don't get air coming into your lungs. Your lips and your glottis stay shut. Yeah. And you're brought to the surface and within a few seconds, they blow on your face and you come to. So that's kind of benign. If it happens deeper out of the reach of the safety divers,

like you really screw up. Yeah. Then you're in trouble. I mean, it's insane. If anyone hasn't seen, we can even drop a video in here, Will, of there was a couple videos that I saw of people passing out during like uh or blacking out during like even like shallow water dives or like long breath holds even like in a pool and it looks

insane like it looks like this they're dead right it's insane they're blue in the face and everything they're unconscious there's water like for you to sit here and be like you know it's not that bad you know it's like what is that it's crazy obviously it's something we want to avoid right yeah of course but it's just but there's no the body even though it looks kind of grisly and everything, the body isn't in that moment kind of undergoing any permanent damage or anything like that. You still have about 50% saturation of your arterial blood for oxygen.

And that's plenty for the brain and everything that needs oxygen. This is just your brain shutting off as a preventative measure. Yeah, it's just like your computer when it kind of gets to a certain amount of the battery, it shuts down to preserve its like a basic function. Right, but you can still plug it back in and it'll turn on. And it's fine, yeah. that makes sense. And in the safety divers that are with you, what depth do they track you down and where do they meet back up with you? On a very deep dive, they'll come to meet me at 40 meters, so 120 feet. But we also have like a sonar system that you can track the diver for the whole duration of the dive.

You can see exactly where they are. And if something happens during the dive, we have a counter ballast weight that can be dropped on the backside of the platform and that pulls the, the dive line up with it. And now we're not touching the dive line, but we have a running carabina, like a lanyard. So we're kind of clipped on to that rope with the carabina. Oh, interesting. And if the counterbalas has dropped, the whole rope assembly comes up. Pulls the carabiner. Pulls the carabiner and you with it. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. I mean, that's worst case scenario. That's like if the sonar is like, oh, he's not moving, we got to do something. Exactly. Drop the counterbalist. Yeah. And then I guess other. issues that can happen. I know this happened to the guy who made, I think, the deepest

descend with a sled that on the way up, it wasn't necessarily oxygen. It was like too much nitrogen or something like that. And I guess he suffered like stroke on the way to the surface. Yeah, it's DCS or like bubbles forming in the blood from coming up too quickly. He actually passed out due to the nitrogen from narcosis. the gases that we breathe at the surface, that we don't even kind of, they're benign on the surface, they can become narcotic at depth. And so that nitrogen led him to pass out. And so he came up too quickly. And yeah, those bubbles form when you come up too quick. And the same way that like if you open a bottle of Coke really quickly, then the bubbles come out of the bottle. Right. I mean,

it's just so, so insane. And I guess when you consider all of the risks associated with it, I mean, it just seems unbearable. And I forget, actually, I think it was like a Vsauce video. This is like a YouTuber that talks about like interesting science things. He mentioned that drowning and like suffocation is the greatest fear that humans have in terms of death. And what you do on a regular basis is confronting that in a really dramatic way.

And it's just, it's really wild. And I think a lot of people wonder like how. and why. And your story is interesting that you're, you're born in England and at a very young age, your parents are like, all right, we're going to go be pirates. And they throw you on a boat. And then you just basically live the first like five years of your life just like on a boat sailing around, right? And you're just constantly in the water growing up from like a very young age. And then from that point, you're just immersed in the water, but you don't start free diving until like 2003, roughly. Pretty much. Yeah. And what drew you to it? And ultimately, what is

the thing that once you start doing it, you're like, oh yeah, this is what I'm going to dedicate my life to. Yeah, it was kind of drawing me back. And when I look back, even at the time between when we sold the boat when I was 10 and I found free diving when I was like 22, there's kind of like a breadcrumb trail in there of like the ocean kind of calling me back. Like even like I wrote a poem on a on a dance floor when I was at university. And it's in it like I couldn't do a better job now of writing a poem about free diving, even though I didn't know anything about the sport back then, didn't even know it existed. So when I found out that it existed, I was like, oh, I want to try that, traveled to the Caribbean and pretty much spent like every day for the next four three months,

going out with the scuba boats, just diving by myself, which is like the cardinal sin of free diving right? It makes it super dangerous and I'd never do that again now, of course, but back then I didn't know anything so I was just diving shallow depths to begin with and fill in love of it and I think the reason it attracts me so much there's many many different reasons the biggest ones would be that it's a sensation it's a experience that is so unlike anything that we experience above the surface we have gas solid and liquid we can only move through gas and liquid but we spend all our lives on gas actually on the boundary between gas and solid or on the boundary between gas and liquid. Free diving is the only activity where you're fully immersed in the liquid. Even scuba, you know, you've got like this

room full of air that's compressed into a cylinder on your back. Submarines, like other aquatic sports like swimming or water polo, like they all happen on the boundary between water and air and take advantage of that fact. So free diving is pure immersion. And it's the only activity that gives you that. And it's such a different experience. Yeah. And you'd basically get into it and you're like, yeah, this is, this is what I'm doing. And I'm so curious that those first couple world records that you're breaking and the first

couple times that you're like, yo, I'm going to go for this. It's interesting because it is this weird balance between athleticism where you're just an athlete that's able to swim. extreme discipline in terms of like diet and training regimen and then this extreme mental discipline that I don't think is found really in any other sport maybe like rock climbing or something I'm curious do you think there's any other sport that combines those specific things in such a unique way yeah that's actually the second biggest reason for me or biggest attraction of free diving is that it has that mental and physical component and they're both at a hundred

100% because prior to free diving as a kid, I used to play in chess tournaments. And I was pretty good. But I would come home from these tournaments and like put the trophy on the table and then just like puke, puk my ring out kind of thing. Because I had all this physical stress and energy that wasn't coming out. And so the physical side wasn't satiated. Oh, interesting. You're building up all this cortisol in your blood.

And then there's no way to exercise because you're just sitting there with your mind. And then later on in university, I rode for a while. And that was beautiful just being on the water. And it's like super kind of physical discipline uses your whole body. But there wasn't the mental components. Right. It's kind of mindless. Just pull.

And I'm sure there are other sports. Maybe rock climbing is one of those. I haven't tried it myself where there's strong physical and mental components. But in free diving, it's 100% of both. So you can't get to 100 meters on brute force alone. If you're not relaxed, if you're not in control of your mind, then you're always going to succumb to that. And likewise, you can't just meditate yourself down there.

You need to have the technique and the explosive power and all the other elements of resistance that are required for. Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned you before. I really love motorcycles for the reason that it forces you to focus. I sometimes get distracted by things and like we'll be all over the place. But when you're on a motorcycle and you're going down the highway and it's just you and like all the trees and you're going 80 miles an hour, it's like I am thinking about here

and now. And I'm so locked into this present moment because any deviation from that, if you're thinking about work, you're thinking about your wife, you're thinking about whatever, all of a sudden now you're introducing too many variables and your brain is just forcing them out. So this extremely high-stakes situation is all of a sudden locking you into the present moment. I'm curious, does that happen with you when you're at a disqualification? and you're like nothing can enter this. Yeah, yeah, you have to get into that state.

So thoughts of the, I mean, the water does a good job of taking that away. Like if you just go to the beach and jump in the surf, then it's hard to be worrying about what's going to happen in the future or kind of obsessed with what you should have said yesterday kind of thing. So the water takes it away, but yeah, we definitely kind of use mental techniques to get into that state more and deeper. And so that day that you break that world record, you swim down a football field,

I'm curious what that process was like. Can you kind of take me through some of the preparation and then actually taking me to the day where you're waking up, working on the mental and then actually descending? So what was the impetus leading up to that? And remind me, where did you do it again? Is that at a blue...

It's Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas, yeah. Yeah, blue hole. And that's like a legendary free dive spot. Yeah, now it's the mecca. So vertical blue, which is the competition we organize there, it's kind of like the Wimbledon of free diving and all the top athletes make sure that they come for that event. Right.

And it's interesting that it's communal in that way, considering that the sport is so individualized. You know, like on the day of the event, everyone's showing up, but it's like you're on your own and you're doing this completely solo. Do you find that there's, like the free dive community, Do you find that there's a lot of cohesion? Do you find similarities amongst other free divers? You meet them and you're like...

Absolutely. Yeah. And there has to be that cohesion and community because at the end of the day, we're training together. We're safetying for each other. You need to know that the person who's safety in you has your back. Right. So, so yeah, there's kind of like a tribe of in free diving and a good spirit amongst us.

There's not too much kind of animosity or like negative rivalry of that. Right. You kind of need the kind of. competition, I feel like a little bit. Like you need some people to like kind of push you. Like, you know, this young guy keeps on, you know, hitting crazy depths. Like, that's going to keep me on my game. Uh-huh. But ideally it's like cooperative, right? Yeah. I'm curious. Are there specific, uh, are there specific people or like groups or cultures that are really good at at free diving? Like, I know that there's, I think you posted about this actually on Instagram that there was like, like,

people always post about this tribe. And the Philippines? Yeah, that's like amazing at diving. And I think you kind of were a little skeptical. I think you were like, wow. Well, they are amazing at diving. It's the Bajao tribe. Yeah. And they live on boats, basically, and dive with no equipment. Like, they open their eyes underwater.

They're diving with these, like, makeshift spears and underwater for a long time. But it always gets inflated, right? So the actual time that they're underwater, I think, is maybe kind of a couple of minutes at depths of, like, 30 to maybe 90 feet at the most. But over the years, I've seen that inflated to the point where now they're talked about being under the water for 13 minutes to greater depths. Right. So I was just kind of taking aim at that. Gotcha.

Just more like other people's inflation of the story. No pun intended. But no, they are. I mean, for them to do that. And they've actually adapted themselves. I don't know if it's evolution, but they have larger spleens than average. The spleen is an organist, kind of like a sponge that's full of red blood cells. And red blood cells is what carry and store oxygen.

Oh, interesting. And that sponge, that spleen, contracts during a dive to squeeze those blood cells out into circulation. It's part of what we call the dive reflex, which is like this huge kind of collection of physiological reactions to being on a breath hold underwater. So, yeah, the spleen stores more blood and therefore more oxygen. which helps them for diving. And I think their eyes might have adapted a little bit as well

to being able to see better underwater without goggles. Oh, like in salt water. Oh, wow. So they're definitely, yeah, they're pretty amazing. And maybe if one of those guys was taken from the tribe and given kind of the resources to train free diving for several years, who knows, maybe they could go deeper. Oh, that's interesting.

You've got to take one on as a student. You got to go over there. Do you like, have you seen the movie The Blindside? No. This girl, she finds like a kid. he becomes a football player. You got to do that. You got to go over there and be like, hey, jump in the boat.

We're going free diving and then just teach him everything. It's just a wild thing. I'm curious, are there any cultures specifically where all the best free divers come out of this place or all the best free divers are, you know, this body composition or this body type or anything like that? No, not that I've seen. I mean, we've got world record free divers from Slovenia,

Russia, France, all over the show. A lot in Europe. but that might just be because that's been where it's been practiced. I would say, yeah, there's no kind of like body shape that's obviously having bigger lungs. You'd think it would help, right? And it does for the pool disciplines where you are moving kind of close to the surface or just lying there holding your breath. But in depth, what happens is your lungs get compressed.

And so if you have a huge lung volume on the surface, to get off the surface because you're so buoyant, you have to wear weights. And when you descend, that lung volume will be compressed. So you lose that buoyancy and you're left with all this weight around your waist. So that becomes very hard to get back up. Interesting.

So that's why a lot of the aquatic mammals actually exhale before they dive because the buoyancy change means more energy expense. So depth is kind of like the big equalizer in that sense, because having a big lung volume doesn't necessarily help. Being tall or long-limbed doesn't necessarily help. Maybe for the monophon, having like a longer core might help a little bit. But there's not any one thing that really like a basketball, obviously height is everything. Of course.

But not so much in free diving, I don't think. That's interesting. Yeah, like diving on the exhale is an interesting concept. I actually did like a, I forgot what it is, it's like a Wim Hof breathing exercise where basically it's like, and you're basically like oxygenating your blood. You're not. Sorry, just to cut in there, you're not oxygenating. What am I doing? You're hyperventilating, which doesn't, so at the moment, your blood oxygen is 100% saturated.

It's like if that cup is 100% full, then you can't put more water into the cup, right? So there's no breathing method that you can use right now to increase the oxygen. oxygen saturation of your blood. This is one of the huge misnomer's in free diving as well as, especially in like outside and those kind of practices. So what you're doing with that breathing is your lowering carbon dioxide, which is the waste gas that we produce. You're getting rid of that from your bloodstream and also from your body water where it dissolves

and it forms carbonic acid. So getting rid of huge amounts of carbon dioxide makes it easy then for you to hold your breath because it's the CO2, the buildup of the CO2, that gives you the urge to breathe. The urge to breathe or that kind of like hunger for air is not due to a lower level of oxygen. It's due to a higher level of CO2. Oh, interesting. So it's not the oxygen itself. It's the byproduct of the oxygen.

So if you get rid of the byproduct, then as it's building up, you're able to be submerged for longer. You just start with a lower level of CO2. And so it takes longer to build up to those critical levels where it becomes like, gives you that suffocating feeling. Oh, interesting. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so we'll edit my part out where I look like an idiot. No, no, sorry.

No, leave it because it's a popular misnomer or misconception that we can breathe more and oxygenate the blood. You can't. Oh, interesting. So I'm at 100% right now. Exactly. And that's actually the best for someone who's trained to tolerate high CO2. That's actually the best way to start a breath hold or a dive.

Oh, so it's not decreasing your CO2. It's being able to withstand. more CO2. Because the CO2 is actually what triggers that dive reflex I talked about that adapts you to the water and allows you to conserve the oxygen you have better. So I actually need to have that CO2 in my body. Otherwise, I'll black out sooner in a free dive. That's interesting. So you're basically increasing your tolerance rather than decreasing the amount you start with. Exactly. That's fascinating. But decreasing the amount you start with, hyperventilating like that, is the shortcut. to being able to hold your breath longer

like you did on an exhale, especially, and you get this like buzzy feeling, I'm sure, like maybe like kind of pins and needles. Yeah, exactly. That's what the exercise was. So it's like you, you know, spit out all this carbon dioxide and then on the exhale, you go, and then you're able to hold it because if I just did that right now,

I can maybe hold it for 10 to 15 seconds. But when I did that exercise, I was able to hold it for like a minute. Yeah. So I guess what's happening there is, again, that shortcut where you're decreasing all the CO2 and then I have a minute to sort of build up that byproduct and then I need to breathe again. Exactly, yeah.

I see. Whereas if you hold your breath now without any preparation like that, then you maybe stop holding your breath after 20, 30 seconds. But if we were to put a pulse oxymeter, like measure your oxygen at that time, it would still be at 100% or very close to it. So you haven't really used that much oxygen. It's just that you've produced CO2 and your body's starting to respond to that. Oh, interesting. And then as I'm moving my body, I'm exerting energy, which is then creating the byproduct.

Yeah, yeah. Got it. So this is what you're talking about with that balance, where if I breathe out all my CO2 and I just sink, I'm not exerting any additional byproduct. Or I can take a deep breath and then I'm using my body, but I have a little bit more time. Yeah. Yeah. So the aquatic mammals do it because they can store a lot more oxygen in their, in their, body. So in their blood has a lot more red blood cells and their muscle actually has a huge amount of myoglobin which is similar to red blood cells. So they store like 80% of their oxygen in their in their blood and muscle tissue. Whereas for ourselves for humans we're not as good on that side so we still do need to inhale before a dive in order to have good oxygen stores but we're just not necessarily benefited if we have like a freakish lung volume.

Like some of the guys who do pool training, poor disciplines, have lung volumes that are kind of 50 or 100% more than the average. So 15, 16 liters total. And that helps for just a pure breath hold on the surface. But again, it's like trying to bring a buoy with you. Yeah, it's just tough. When you go down for a deep dive. And they're literally just expanding their lungs ability,

like stretching it like a like a muscle i guess yes stretching the whole rib cage the diaphragm all that tissue and as well as that if they're static apnea so pure breath hold specialists they'll fast in order to um to get rid of muscle mass so that they have a a smaller engine basically it's like having a kind of a small one-liter car um with a huge um gas tank on it oh interesting yeah and so you're so i guess a lot of people will be like, oh, I can't free dive because I wasn't born with big lungs. But that's not the case. You can physically expand your capacity to take in oxygen and then additionally expand your threshold to not to be able to handle more CO2. Yeah. Oh, wow. And if you're able to do both of those things, that's when you're actually able to hold your breath for multiple minutes. Yeah, there's,

more to it than that because there's obviously the mental component comes into it as well. Right. But yeah, those are two of the bigger factors for sure. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so on the day that you are breaking that record, you wake up and what's happening mentally here? Hopefully as little as possible. I mean, the more thoughts, thoughts obviously consume energy and get you into patterns that can be counterproductive, especially what I call scenario thinking.

And that's pretty much all your brain is going to want to do if you're like preparing for a performance. What happens if something goes wrong? What happens if I get the record and how's that going to be? And so you just get sucked into these rabbit holes where you're thinking, you're hallucinating, right, about stuff that pretty much all of it isn't going to happen. Maybe one of those scenarios maybe will come to pass. but the rest of it is just hallucinating about fiction. And not only that, but it has repercussions to you mentally and physically. So if you're thinking about something that stresses you out,

then you activate the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight reflex. So your hormones are going to be adrenaline and cortisol. And as those build up, your heart rate goes faster. You start kind of consuming more energy. And you're in the completely the wrong place for what has to be kind of a game of economy in a free dive where you're trying to go as far as you can on a limited amount of oxygen. So, yeah, not getting sucked into that kind of cyclical thinking and all the effects it has mentally and physically is the main goal in the morning. Right. And just going through your routine, focusing on the moment, using, techniques to count or to put off or just to detach from that kind of thinking.

But yeah, just trying to stay mellow, I guess. All right, guys, I got to tell you a story. This is when I was in Florida. We were driving to school. I was probably like seven or eight. I'm sitting out a stoplight. Me, my mom, my sister's in the car. All of a sudden, bam, someone hits us from behind.

The whole back of the car, dented, crumpled in. The woman gets out of the car. My mom gets out of the car. They start talking. I kid you not. The woman that hits her excuse, she goes, I sneezed. You sneezed?

That pissed me off. I'm going to be honest. Maybe the most expensive sneeze of all time. I couldn't think of a more expensive sneeze, man. There might be like a plane crash or something. But anyway, my mom just kept it moving. And the back of our car was dented for like six months. I was so embarrassed every time I went to soccer practice.

Everyone was like, Mark, what happened to your car? And I was like, look, there's a lady with allergies driving around my area and hit us. What we could have done is reached out to Morgan and Morgan. They have over 100 law offices and over 800 attorneys. And this is the thing that's cool with Morgan and Morgan. It's so easy to submit a claim. Yeah. It's like eight clicks or less. You don't even have to leave your couch. You don't have to go to a website, call up all these attorneys, be like, hey, are you not going to rip me off? None of that. And this is the cool thing about Morgan and Morgan. This is what's wild about it. Their fee is free unless they win your case. That's right. Unless they win your case, you don't pay a dollar. That's a pretty good deal. And that seems like a pretty good incentive that they're going to fight for you. So if you're ever injured, or there's a lady with allergies behind you that's sniffing saffron all day,

that bumps into you and your mom. For more information, go to for the people.com slash gagnon. That's right. That's F-O-R-the-people.com slash gaggon. G-A-G-N-O-N-O-N or dial pound-l-pound-pound. That's Pound-2-9 from your cell phone. That's for the people.com slash gagged on Gagdon, G-A-G-N-O-N-N-O-N or pound law from your cell phone. Go get your money. Stop sneezing. God bless you. Let's get back to the show. And what, I'm curious, of the pie chart of, like, training, what percentage of it is dedicated to, like, physical ability, like, stretching, mobility, weightlifting, things like that.

And then what percentage of it is dedicated to just pure meditation? So pure meditation by itself, is something that I don't, I don't, I don't, think I do that frequently where I'm just kind of sitting and only meditating. But a lot of the training that I do for breath hold to develop that tolerance to high CO2 and to low oxygen, a lot of that training involves meditative techniques. I guess that's a better question. I guess like breath work specifically. Yeah. So there's that kind of breath work where I'm maybe just sitting still dry, doing an exhale static like you did,

but doing 10 of them with just one breath between. So holding my breath for as long as I can, taking inhale, exhale, keep on holding for as long as I can. That kind of work. There's also a lot of pool training where I'm swimming laps underwater. Maybe it's just kind of 25 metres,

25 yards of the pool with a few seconds or a couple of breaths between them and repeating that, decreasing the interval, increasing the distance. And then resistance training to try and develop more explosive power, especially in ways that are specific to the armstroke and the leg kick for free diving. That makes sense. Flexibility work, working on the flexibility of the rib cage, the diaphragm, and also the rigid airways, your trachea and your bronchae,

which are kind of semi-rigid, but they're the last point of resistance in terms of developing adaptation to depth. Oh, interesting. And what is loosening up the trachea here? Is that to breathe in more oxygen, push out more CO2, both? Like, how do we do it? Yeah, what is the purpose of loosening your trachea?

So as your lungs become compressed, they reach their limit of compression. It's kind of like if you imagine bringing a balloon and a glass bottle underwater, the pressure is just going to shatter that bottle at a few feet of depth. The balloon you can take to any depth at all because it's completely flexible, right?

Interesting. We want our body to be more like the balloon than the glass bottle. And it's kind of in the middle there, but we have this rib cage that makes the whole container semi-rigid. And we also have rigid airways that extend into the lungs

that are propped open with cartilage. And so those don't want to compress too much as well. So as you get down way below the volume, volume of a full exhale. Like if I breathe out all my air here now, that's the volume I reach at about 100 feet. So going past that, obviously the volume keeps shrinking more and more, and you have to be able to tolerate that as well. And the last, the most difficult place to develop that flexibility is always going to be in the trachea and the bronchae. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And I think an interesting point is I think a lot of people might be

familiar with scuba diving where you kind of if you go down to the same depths that you're doing on one breath you have to wait to come up because otherwise you get the bends but you're able to descend all the way because you're only going on one breath exactly so your lungs and everything you're compressing and then re-expanding to the same exact rate so you don't have to readjust as you come up right yeah so whereas in scuba if you took a breath at 100 meters that breath once it comes up to the surface would be like 11 times as much air. And so it would expand to 11 times the volume. So you've taken a huge amount of gas and at that depth and that all that nitrogen then dissolves into your blood and creates the problems. In free diving, we don't have any of that. Right.

We have different problems. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was getting open water scuba certified, my instructor told me he's like, if there's people like snorkeling with you, don't give them any oxygen at the bottom because sometimes people will do that without thinking they'll be with the friend their friend is snorkeling they'll be scuba diving and then they'll be like hey take some oxygen and they'll take a breath at depth even if it's only you know 20 feet or something and then when they come up they're if they're not breathing out air their lungs will explode they're getting expansion injury yeah yeah which is just wild but people i guess don't realize that no it's it's not something that you would kind of think of if you didn't understand the the the way gases compresses and

expand but I've had scuba divers when I've been free diving I there's a spot where I used to kind of swim down to just 60 feet and go into a cave and lie on the sandy bottom in the cave and just lie there for a few minutes I guess and sometimes like a scuba group would come around the corner go into the cave see me lying there and think that I'm like a dead body or like try and shove a regulator in my mouth so yeah we would lay in a cave for a couple minutes for fun it's a it is immense fun. I mean, it's a different kind of a fun. It's an amazing experience that takes you within yourself and you experience so much more about what you are in essence, like right, right,

deep down without all the extraneous stuff. What do you find out about yourself when you're lying in a cave alone for a few minutes? So it puts you in an intimate contact with this speck of awareness that's at your center. that's just your consciousness. And we kind of get hung up or fixated or like into this concept of identity being like our thoughts or our body or our person or the memories that we have of our life. And it's not any of those things. You could take away all of those things,

even the sensations, the sensory experience you have, and you would still have in the center of this. kind of spec of awareness. And that's what we experience in a free dive because a free dive is very good at taking away all the extraneous shit. Like underwater, you don't have much of a concept of space because every direction is uniform and there's no kind of sensation of your own gravity. Like sitting in this chair, I can feel my weight, pushing me into the chair.

chair and so you have kind of this field of of space around you that you're aware of underwater everything is is uniform every direction is the same and so it kind of disappears because of that as well as that there's no sound in a deep free dive there's nothing visually often we'll close our eyes but even if you open them it's just kind of a blank like dark dark blue or black Oh, interesting. No smell, nothing else. Even thoughts themselves, as we talked about, they kind of get stripped away. So you're not experiencing your own thoughts, or at least the empty spaces between thoughts are extended for a much longer time.

And we don't realize it, but the passing of time, I think, is kind of instinctively measured in our bodies by our breathing. So you can't hear your heart rate most of the time, but you can feel and hear your breath. And that gives you kind of an indication of a rhythm of time. And so when you suspend that and hold your breath, then it's almost as if time stops. So you lose space, you lose time, you lose sensations, you lose thoughts. And all that's left often is just this pinprick of awareness without any contents. to that awareness. And that's obviously the goal of meditation, right?

But at least for myself, it takes me, if I'm lucky, like 30, 40 minutes to hit that spot, whereas in a free dive you get there in seconds. So it's kind of a shortcut to Nirvana, I guess, if you want to call it, but you asked if it's fun and that's the experience that we're having when we're lying in a cave at 60 feet or in a deep free dive as well. And that's huge part of the attraction for the sport. Wow. Have you ever done a sensory deprivation tank?

Floating, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are cool too. Do you find that? I mean, obviously it's not the same thing, but at terms of, okay, there's no visual field, not really much smell.

I guess you're kind of smell like salt water. The water is perfectly the same temperature as your skin, so you don't really have a ton of physical awareness as to like where your body begins and ends. And no real hearing because you're, submerge in the water, you know, your ears are below. Is it similar in any regard? And in your experience doing it, have you found that you were able to kind of reach a similar kind of state? Yeah, it's very similar. The two things that lacks is obviously you are still breathing. I mean,

you can hold your breath as well. And then your thoughts, at least my thoughts in a deprivation tank, they're still coming. They're still flowing. And I spend most of my time just like observing those thoughts. Whereas in a deep free dive, most of the time, you know, It's just being present in that pinprick of awareness, just kind of inhabiting that and not much else. Yeah. Do you think this practice has helped? I want to talk about anxiety because I know a lot of your work has dealt with anxiety and people dealing with sort of like psychological disorders or emotional disorders

that breathing techniques and sort of like presence in this type of. you know, technique has really helped with. So yeah, I'm curious how, did you find that you were like more anxious before and then you start free diving and you're able to calm it? Did you find that these things subconsciously were just manifesting in your life and you're like, oh, wow, we're actually, you know, I'm able to be more one in this moment. Like how did it impact your emotional state and like your perspective on the world? Yeah, it's a scenario I'm moving more into now because I've kind of realized the huge potential

that these techniques that we use in training and in order to go deep have a profound application to stress and anxiety in day-to-day life, whether it's at home or at the workplace, wherever you are. And it's a epidemic right now. I mean, everyone is stressed and anxious. The statistics, I think 40% of adults have anxiety or stress disorder, and that's an actual disorder. it's not just kind of like a mild thing. So it's out of control and what I've discovered is that these techniques have a crazy application to those situations.

And it's not just being able to detach from the thoughts and inhabit that place, but the breathing techniques as well that we use and it's not hyperventilation, it's mostly diaphragmatic breathing, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system. We talked before about fight or flight and the adrenaline and cortisol. That's a sympathetic nervous system.

And you can go in the opposite direction by breathing through your nose into your diaphragm in a certain way. And that will calm you down and release hormones that activate the parasympathetic nervous system and slow the heart rate, slow the metabolism down. allow you to, it also influences your thinking as well because it activates different areas of the brain that kind of pacify your thinking as well. So instead of getting sucked into this kind of negative spiral where the negative thoughts stimulate your fight or flight and that stimulates more negative thoughts, we go into an upward spiral of kind of boosting your confidence and developing equanimity like the ability just to stay calm even in difficult or adverse situations yeah i feel that i've

definitely in the past and even now to an extent of struggle with anxiety and feeling anxious and just not even realizing i'll just be sitting there thinking about a million things i got to deal with and i'll feel my breath being very short and i'll just be like exactly yeah and i'm not even aware of it it's just i'm feeling bad and i don't even really know why and i'm like my body's getting cold and i'm kind of like recoiling, kind of getting small. And the way that you're breathing is telling your body to be more anxious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're breathing with your chest and there's stretch receptors in your rib cage.

And I feel the tension. It's very bizarre. I'll feel physical like a muscle or something in my chest is getting tighter. And I guess that is that negative spiral where my brain is telling my body, hey, we're a little concerned. And my body's like, we should be concerned. And then when it's telling my brain, you're right. And then it just keeps on negative feet.

Yeah, and there's actually feedback from the stretch receptors in your rib cage that tell your brain, we're breathing this way, we must be stressed. Right. So continue with that stressful thinking. Exactly. And it's, it's awful. And one of the things that I've done that kind of helps is like, I forget exactly what the name for it is, but like a little kid after they've been crying, they'll go and it's like almost a double breath. Yeah. And it kind of for me, it's actually helpful where like if I'm feeling straf so go. And it'll kind of signal to my brain like, we can calm down and it works miraculously. I'm curious, has that a thing that you've ever heard of like the double breath or anything like that? Yeah, I think it's called the physiological sigh. Okay. Is that ringing bell? Maybe. Yeah. Human man talks about that quite a bit as well.

I think that's actually where I heard it from. I think it was Superman. Yeah. So it is definitely a technique and it helps. I find that, I mean, that's maybe a short-term fix. But in the long-term, in order to stop that fight or flight being activated, breathing into your belly and having kind of a permanent, except if you're like working out really hard, a permanent practice of using the diaphragm to breathe is what's going to hold you in that place of calmness and equanimity for a longer period of time. And in particular, like this technique, so I've developed a system now called the mental immune system where that combines the mental part, the mental techniques with the physical, the breathing methods and some other physical techniques.

And the reason I call it the immune system is because it has to be programmed into your subconscious for it to work. If you're, like you talked about realizing that you're breathing in a certain way when you're anxious, if your body can recognize that something that's stressful as happening or something as adverse is happening and then activate a way of placating that, of kind of soothing it before you're even aware of it. That's the game changer. Once you're subconsciously preventing that hyperventilation from happening, then your brain is going, hey, we're anxious. My body goes, no, we're okay. Not just preventing the bad, but actually

enhancing the good. So enhancing the diaphragmatic breath, which so soothes you. And so you can program this into your subconscious mind in the same way that you have like a immune system that's working behind the scenes so that when you encounter bacteria viruses you don't have to think about like okay guys deal with this cold it just happens right we have to have the same reaction to stress and anxiety otherwise if you're in a meeting and you're getting stressed out you can never like go into the corner and like start breathing in a certain way is it that you'll never remember to do that let alone be able to do it. Right. By the time you need it, it's already too late.

Exactly. The same in an argument. Like, who hasn't been in a situation where they're just like, they find themselves kind of blue in the face, like, screaming and like their heart rate and they're sweating and they're shaking maybe. Like all of that is the sympathetic nervous system that's been activated. And the opposite can be true. So you can find yourself in that kind of a situation that's normally very stressful. and then you notice that instead of having that reaction instead you are kind of breathing deeply into

your belly you're mentally you're you feel like you're behind kind of soundproof glass like you're on the other side of this invisible barrier so mentally you can't be affected as well and so even though what's happening is not a good situation it's stressful you aren't responding to it of stress you're like holding your inner calmness. Right. And how can you practice that? I'm sure this is obviously explained within, you know, your course and program. But what are some of the things that I could do?

You know, when I'm feeling stressed, let's say I'm, you know, going to go up on stage at a really big, important comedy show. And I'm like, feeling my hyperventilation, I'm feeling my chest get tight. What are some things I can do to help? Yeah. So bringing your breath back into your belly, breathing with the diaphragm. I don't even really think I know what that means. Like, this is through my nose.

nose? Definitely through your nose. Okay. Yeah. So through your nose is all sorts of reasons, but it's one of them is that it releases nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which is an incredible gas. It's actually made in thunderstorms as well. But that dilates your bronchial tubes and does all sorts of other good things. So breathing through your nose is important for a variety of reasons. And then breathing deeply into the diaphragm as if you're kind of just trying to inflate the belly pushing the air down into the belly so that the lungs are shaped like pyramids

and if you inflate the lower half that's where all the volume is so it's a more efficient way of breathing as well as being kind of calming right if you feel like you you so that was a full breath and I saw your shoulders go up which means that you're breathing into your rib cage. It doesn't need to be like a huge breath, but just if you keep one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest, and then just think about like pushing,

like breathing in a way that pushes that hand out. There you go. So that's a belly breath. Have I ever, I don't know if I've ever done that before. So here's the thing. How stupid am I? I've never breathed.

You have when you were, I mean, I'm sure you've done it more recently, but when you're a baby, they only breathe like this. Yeah, that's a good point. Sometimes I see babies breathing. It's just like their whole belly's,

like going up and down. And we unlearn it, even though it's the most efficient way, we unlearn it because we encounter stress. And so that stress tells our body to breathe, gasp air into your upper lungs, which is completely counterproductive. It cycles the stress. So just breathing into the belly,

doesn't need to be too deep, doesn't need to be fast. And how many of those should I do? Like, is it one of those things? Like, how do I program that to be in my subconscious? So the programming part is the, it takes work. But the idea is that you tackle small, small hills, small, like, problems at a time. So, like, purposely taking on something that's just mildly stressful and then working through it, focusing on breathing into your belly. So, for instance, if there's something that's stressing you out at the moment, I don't know, your mother-in-law is kind of.

to visit in a week or something else and so you just kind of bring that into your awareness to your attention and maybe like characterize it with a phrase or a word that sums that up and then while you're thinking about it and maybe repeating that word breathe into your belly like this slowly deep into the with the diaphragm and on the inhale you're kind of focusing on that breath on the exhale just focusing on letting everything go including that stressful emotion. And still exhaling through the nose. Exhaling can be through the mouth, but through the mose is breathable. So just kind of taking on stress in a moment where you are prepared to deal of it and using that style of breathing makes it start to become a habit. So you're starting to

program the subconscious. That makes sense. And then taking on bigger and bigger challenges. And after a while, you'll start to notice that it then becomes habitual, that you've encountered something that's stressful. And at the same time, before you've thought about it, your breathing has changed and it's become this kind of calming, soothing, diaphragmatic breath. Interesting. And do you find that it also inhibits your thoughts specifically where like you know for me sometimes I'll if I'll be thinking about a future event and like you know like the mother-in-law thing or I'll be thinking about something I did in the past and just by actively focusing on my breathing do you find that it you know not to use too many like esoteric hippie words but like do you find that it grounds

you or it makes you more present in the moment like you find when you're in that cave absolutely yeah so just in the same way that the kind of gasping air into your river cage stimulates different parts. I think it's the amygdala if I'm not mistaken. That's the fear spot, right? Yeah. So it it stimulates the areas of your brain that are prepped to kind of counter danger and threat. Whereas when you're breathing into your diaphragm, it's more kind of prefrontal cortex like the calm passive decision-making. So yeah, definitely it's that feedback loop and in this case it's a positive feedback loop so you get like this upward spiral and then you feel more confident okay i can i can do this i can handle these situations and so then

you go into it with more confidence you have better performance better results brings back more confidence and up and up you go that's interesting why why do you think we unlearn that like what happened is it just modern society like things that are stressing us out in different ways or did human beings always unlearn sort of that stomach breathing and focus more on like that chest breathing. Yeah, the thing is I think there's a disparity between how we've evolved and the dangers that we had during that evolution 10,000 years ago and what we are kind of encountering nowadays. So in the past there were often like serious threats to our life and we needed to be able to respond with the

fight-or-fight reflex in order to run away from a bear or or catch catch food for dinner. And so, yeah, it's served a purpose back then. Nowadays, most of the stress that we counter is not of that kind. So if you're in a Starbucks waiting in the line and the guy in front of you is taking 10 minutes to order a coffee and you're getting like more and more stressed out, activating your fight or flight reflex is not going to help you in that moment unless you want to get into a fight with this guy.

Yeah, of course. Or run away down the street from Starbucks. you have to be able to respond with something that's calming and soothing. Likewise, if you're arguing with your spouse, if you're preparing for a business meeting, if you're public speaking, all these scenarios where we encounter stress and anxiety in our day-to-day life, don't benefit from sympathetic, from fight-of-flight.

They benefit from being calm. And so I think it's a skill that is definitely required for, the lives that we live now, but we've evolved for a different kind of a format. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's just really helpful. That's something I want to think about a lot, like, as I'm in those exact situations, being like, okay, focus on breathing into that stomach. And it's just going to tell my brain, hey, everything's okay. We're chilling right now.

And in your brain at the same time, you can be focusing on just noticing what's going on, noticing what's going on around you, but also noticing what's happening in your head. and noticing that the thoughts you have, even if they're negative or emotional, they're just thoughts, they're just information that's coming out out of a deeper part of your brain to your awareness in the same way that you don't have to

kind of look at or respond to all the information that's coming at you around you, the same thing for your own thoughts. You can just see them as information and use them accordingly. Yeah, that's interesting. I know you talked about like, like before doing,

really deep dives that that devil that's talking to that devil's advocate sort of in your head telling you bad scenarios yeah does that happen as you're descending and like as you're doing the turn are those thoughts still in your head and how do you push out those kinds of thoughts and what are you thinking about how do you what are you mentally processing typically they don't happen at that stage they'll they'll happen early like if I'm getting them at that point then I might be in trouble. But they do, I do get those thoughts just before the dive or as I'm starting. And that's where it's kind of the most delicate moment because anything that happens there will then influence the whole dive after that. So when I, like, for instance, I'm taking my last breath and this

thought pops into my mind, this could be the last breath you're going to take. And obviously, what do you do you do you combat it head on and go, no, it's not? It's going to be okay. Like, do you fight with it? Or do you just kind of try and let it slide through? Maybe there's going to be another fort following it. Or do you, one technique that I've used is to kind of postpone it and tell yourself, okay, I'm going to think about that, but just not right now. I'm going to think about that after the dive.

And of course, after the dive, it's irrelevant. But just giving it a time, scheduling it. like that can be enough to appease that part of your mind that's throwing out these negative thoughts. Oh, interesting. So is that the approach you normally go with? Is sort of postponing the negativity? These days, it's a popular one for me. Yeah, just kind of scheduling it. And you could use this like in your day-to-day life, an example I use as if you're planning a marriage or wedding. And you're worrying about, I don't know if it's going to rain or all sorts of other things. you can tell yourself, okay, I'll worry about that, I'll think about that,

but I'm going to do it on the day after the wedding. And it's kind of like a little slight of hand, I guess, with your own mind. That is enough to get it to like shut up for now and doesn't involve you expending kind of a huge amount of mental energy. Oh, that is interesting. Wow. Yeah, just postponing the thought. I'm really stressed about this business meeting.

And after the meeting, I'll address this thing. I guess, I think in my life, a lot of, like, concerns and anxiety and fear will all clash at the same time. And they're all just happening simultaneously. And I wonder if for you with the work that you've done and the techniques and the breathwork, if you notice thoughts as more like singular capsules, does that make sense? Like a fear or some type of self-doubt will come up just as like a singular moment and you're able to look at it. and say this is just a singular thing that's coming from somewhere in my brain and i can either address it now or later whereas for me things will come up and i'm like it's just happening i feel

like i don't have control or awareness of this thing it's not a capsule it's just sort of encompassing my entire process does that make sense absolutely and that's why i talked about kind of being on the other side of this soundproof glass because as soon as you start noticing your thoughts then you're identifying as them as something that's outside of you that's not you um And you're kind of putting it out there, which means that whatever you are is over here. And that process of detachment breaks its control over you. So no longer are you kind of just like in the middle of this stream or this river of negative thoughts and kind of getting hit by one after the other. You're off to the side observing that process, observing that stream.

And do you do that with all your thoughts or is it only the negative thoughts? To a certain extent, I do evolve with thoughts, I guess, but it really is only required with the negative thoughts. Sometimes there's states that we're in or things that we're doing where we want to just be in that stream. It's like a happy place to just float along it. And sure, we don't kind of need to be detached in that moment. But having that as an ability is really important to minimize the effect that they can have on you. study this idea of the the dissolution of self that you are not you and what people this is like some esoteric you know kind of hippie shit if just when you i bring it up to people they're always like

what but i guess it's this idea that you are not you and that when people think about themselves they're like oh i am my brain and my body my everything and as you sort of strip that back and start to see your thoughts as things that sort of come into your mind and feelings as things that sort of just enter into your mind that you don't necessarily have to engage with. You can just sort of watch. You kind of start to break down this idea of what the self is and that you can actually, like this is where enlightened people, I guess, will say, you don't exist. That you are an observer of thoughts and this you that you thought you were isn't actually

who you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely not a hippie ship because anyone can experience that right now. I mean, it's a pretty simple thought experiment in order to prove that you are not thinking your thoughts, you're just experiencing them. What is that thought experiment? Just noticing, like, where are your thoughts coming from? If I tell you to pick a number between one and five, like, did you choose that number,

the number that came up? I think I did. Or did it just pop into your head? And if you chose it, if you validated it, if the number, like, four came and you went, okay, we'll go a four, then that process of validation, the approval, where did that come from? And as soon as you start chasing your thoughts like that, you find that all of them are just coming to you. You're not choosing to have your thoughts. And the idea that you could choose to have your thoughts is kind of, it should be happy shit because there's no way that that's possible.

Right. So we don't have, and yeah, it's kind of a little sad to, to think of it, but we don't have free will. We're just experiencing our thoughts in the same way that we're experiencing, you're experiencing what I'm saying right now. The thoughts in your head are exactly the same. And you can prove that scientifically as well with experiments where they ask someone to pick a color. And if you are monitoring the brain with senses, you can actually see what color they're going to pick a moment before they're going to pick. They're going to pick a moment before they're aware of it because it's obviously coming up from somewhere in the brain and you can see

that happening with the senses before that person is actually conscious of it and you're pretty confident that we don't really have free will well that proves it doesn't it if we don't have any control over our thoughts if they are we're experiencing them in the same way as everything else then there can be no free will yeah that's a difficult concept it's it's a difficult pill to swallow But it's a scientific fact as well as something that you can experience. And you can experience it in free dive as well as in meditative states as well as with these thought experiments. Right. In those deep free dives I talked about where you just become this speck of awareness and nothing else,

that's what you are. You are not an identity. An identity is just a collection of memory. memories and thoughts and experiences and everything else, you're not your body because you can take away pieces of your body and that doesn't change who you are. And you're not your own thoughts because you're not in control of those. So all you are is just this, like the analogy that I use is in a cinema, just like someone seated in the audience who cannot, interact with what's happening on the on the cinema screen.

And everything that happens happens on that screen. So including your own thoughts. They're all up there. The sites that you see, experiences you have, everything is on that cinema screen. And you're just the guy in the audience who's watching it all and experiencing it, but not able to change necessarily the outcome of that film. Yeah, that's an interesting idea.

I have to think about that more. guess my thought is that just because something's coming up doesn't mean that you can or can't choose to act on that that feeling and that action maybe is the the free will yeah but the choice the choice to act on it or not where is that coming from right that's that's where you like as soon as you start chasing it you just you always led back to something that's not by your own design that's happening as part of it's it's happening in your brain there's no doubt about that but the part of your brain that's making these choices or choosing the number between one and ten is not a part that's conscious or that you have control over.

Right. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'm curious about that. And for you personally, do you ever find that if someone does something that it grieves you, some guy cuts you off in traffic or some guy's being an asshole, does that deterministic mindset kind of set in where you're like, oh, he's not even, he doesn't even know what he's doing? Actually, yeah, yeah, it helps to be able to generate empathy a lot more with people.

Like even people who have pissed me off in the past or who are essentially bad people, maybe committed crimes, you can kind of understand that they are just inside. They're just like a speck of awareness like myself that is a long for a ride in a vehicle that's not doing so good. that's screwed up in one way and other. Yeah. Interesting. And have you, I don't know if you're allowed to answer this to, you know, competition and things like that, but have you experimented with drugs and, you know, mushrooms and psychotrically types of medicines and things like that? Before I got into free diving, yeah, I did a lot in university. I did most of them. And then I was, most of them. That's such a funny way to describe it. Most of the ones that were

out there. I've done all. I've done all of them. I've done every, just describe me. That was a So can you expand on sort of that topic and how that relates to this idea of self that you've uncovered through free diving? Sure. So, yeah, when in those days, university, I was enjoying that kind of a life. But I was fully aware of the fact that it wasn't sustainable. Like I couldn't go my whole life in that place. And also, I was experiencing states that were just like mind-blowingly.

blissful, for example. And I told myself, I want to experience that, but not because I've just pressed a button in my brain with a drug. I want to experience that because of something I've done or something that I've achieved. And so I felt like this urge to get there through my own path. And so, like, just for example, like, have you done mushrooms? Yeah. And that psilocybin is acting on your brain.

You push a button that makes you feel, you know, interconnect. with everything. And have you been able to achieve the same effect through just natural achievement or things you've done or meditation? Is it the same? It's, I mean, mushrooms, when I took them, there was more hallucination involved as well to some extent. But yeah, it was the essence of it, the most beautiful part of it was the same, that sense

of interconnectedness of, of, there's been dives where if it's just like a hang at a depth of, say, 200 feet, so I go down and hold onto the rope and completely relax there. And I felt you go so deep into that idea that you are just a speck of consciousness. And then that speck starts to expand and you feel like the, this is going to sound kooky, but you feel like you are the whole planet or the whole ocean as consciousness. So that's kind of a state that I've gotten into in a deep free dive. And also those highs that you get from some of the other drugs where you just feel like unstoppable or blissful.

I've experienced that as well. So to the same degree. Like it's wild for me to think that a substance that, you know, is chemically altering your brain can be achieved just through this, you know, practice or some type of like non-substance enhanced experience. It's almost unbelievable to think that it can be the same. Yeah. No, I attest that it can be. Can it be better? It's better because there's more fulfillment in it, because you know that it's a product of something that you've done or you've achieved. So I remember there was a dive when the first time I got to 90 meters, which is just shy of 300 feet,

free diving. And I came back and I was stoked. And after like after lunch, I sometimes lie down on the couch and take a nap and maybe listen to music. And as I was lying there, listening to music, I got this, this sensation that started kind of like at the tip of my head up here and then just spread all the way down my spine and then like sending kind of like, it's hard to describe this. It's kind of like tingles all out through my extremity. to the point where my whole body felt like I was just kind of like buzzing. And at the same time, I was like, I think I burst into tears as well because I was just feeling like this immense sensation of just joy and fulfillment and everything.

And yeah, that's similar to what you'd experience on ecstasy or other drugs as well. Wow. That came because I guess, and I think this is common in these kind of experiences, They talk about it in Kundalini awakening as well in yoga, that you would kind of do all this work. And then suddenly in one moment, it'll just kind of like come upon you by surprise. The same thing with meditation.

They talk about people reaching enlightenment while they're chopping wood or doing something completely immemial. So yeah, I feel like I can say that, I've reached, I haven't gone back, so I stopped taking drugs of all that nature just before I went on that trip where I started free diving for the first time. And I actually had this pill that an emissary of the Dalai Lama had given to my mother when he met her for a retreat in New Zealand. And it's called a compassion pill. It's basically just like herbs compressed into like a tiny little pill. And I took that as a symbolic way to like end all of that past life with the the drugs and everything and

start whatever it's going to be next. And since then I haven't, um, haven't done anything at all. Your mom met the Dalai Lama and she met in the mystery of the Dalai Lama. And gave and got a pill. That's fascinating. Yeah. So I don't know if that's that pill like what, what it contained or if it did nothing, but definitely mentally, um, I used it as kind of like a, um, a point to change to turn around and the symbolism is beautiful and at that time were you were you using drugs do you feel like in an unhealthy way or was this just you know like collegiate experimentation i don't think i was addicted um to anything and i don't think it was super unhealthy and when you're young you can kind of bounce back from anything but if i'd continued on that route

it probably would have gotten to that point eventually so it was the right time for me to get out Yeah. As Alan Watts says, like drugs are kind of like a phone call. And once you get the message, then you can hang up. So, yeah, I'm lucky enough to have hung up, I guess, at the right moment. And now you're able to get the message in other more sustainable ways. Right? Well, the message was this is what, this is like what you can experience.

Now go out and find a way to experience it naturally. And do you get that experience only through achievement or can it just be through practice? It can be definitely through practice or through even through not necessarily through training or free diving, but I can get that experience like just having a dinner with friends like at a nice restaurant or something. Or just in like social situations sitting on a train sometimes. Like as I say it just kind of comes up on you out of the blue. Has having kids, because you've had two children in the last, you know, like five years or so, Has that changed your capacity to feel feelings like that?

Has it changed your mental and meditative state? Or is it similar to how it was before? No, I'd like to say this. It's similar. Throwing kids into the mix definitely makes life 100 times more complicated. So it is more difficult for me to train right now, amongst other things. But yeah, that capacity is still there. That's not altered at all.

And I'm curious, you feel so. like zen like your vibe even just right now just feels like very calm but simultaneously you're still an athlete that is pushing yourself to an extremely difficult degree and that you know every few years you're like how can I go deeper how can I do more how do you balance that like insatiable competitiveness with this feeling of peace and like oneness with with everything do you feel like those things are at odds they are to a certain extent and I was aware of that going into the sport because As a kid, I was super competitive. I talked about chess and like I always had to win.

I was gutted if I lost the same thing in any game, I guess. And I was aware acutely of the fact that I could not bring that approach into free diving. Because as soon as you dive with the ego to try and beat someone else or to try and achieve something, then it's going to be an obstacle. You're going to trip over it. So I knew that I had to focus on the process and on just this kind of journey of exploration into what I'm capable of doing and what the human species is capable of doing underwater. And so that's always been my focus is just trying to like mine that capacity, that aquaticity, potential underwater as deep as I can go. Right. And you're really blocking out other people as much as you can or other achievements and things like that.

that you're just focused on beating yourself a little more. That's been, yeah, the biggest successes of my career have been when I've been focused like that. It's not always, it's not easy because you get sucked into these stories, like these rivalries and everything else. But definitely when we're focused on the technique rather than the actual results, then we go further in the long run. Yeah, I feel that a lot. I, for me personally, I sometimes get sucked into. to this dichotomy where I'm like, oh, I think the things that would make me truly unhappy, truly happy in life might be at odds with like career pursuits and career

aspirations, especially within my work, you know, stand-up comedy is like, it is an art form that is completely unmeasurable. So what makes one person better than another person? You know, it's like, well, obviously, you know, do they get more laughs in the room or something like that? But ultimately, it's subjective, right? You know, the person you think is the funniest in the world might be different than what he thinks is the funniest in the world. So as a result, you're pursuing an unmeasurable task. They're like pursuing an unmeasurable, unattainable thing. So my pursuit to be like, oh, how can I be the greatest?

And then I'm like, I think that would make me really miserable. And like, did you watch The Last Dance, Michael Jordan's documentary? You watched that and you're like, this guy was fierce and wanted to be the best and was creating enemies in his head that weren't even real. And in the end, it kind of seems like it made him more. more sad in a lot of ways. Yeah. And it's like if the pursuit and the goal is to be at peace and content and present

and happy with what you have, yeah, I just struggle with trying to also be great and have more and be the greatest, you know, things like that. It is a dichotomy. And it's interesting that you have become the greatest, but simultaneously you're still like, yeah, I'm okay. Yeah. I think it requires about. because you have to be hungry for you right you have to have like this the strong

driving force that motivates you and in my case that's pushing me into through this training which isn't always pleasant but at the same time you have to kind of be aware of the fact that yes it's not about the the end result like the achievement itself, it's about that process. So if I've been successful, I guess it's because I've been able to just focus on the moment and on like training as hard as I can today and knowing that that's going to give my body the stimulus to make the changes that it needs to go deeper tomorrow. Right. And not thinking about, okay, in six months' time, I want to be hitting this depth or attempting this record, just like doing the best that I can in this moment.

Have you ever panicked while you're doing a dive? And what is the most sort of traumatic and devastating experience you've had while diving? So have I ever panicked? I don't think so. I'm trying to scan my memory. No, not really. There's been moments when I've felt fear underwater during a deep dive. But because we've kind of programmed a subconscious so much,

much, you still don't change physically what I'm doing. The way that I'm swimming, the way that I'm moving doesn't change. So I wouldn't classify that as a panic because I'm still physically, completely calm. Have I gotten into situations? What's the second part? Were that dangerous? Yeah, like what is the story of the most traumatic or devastating dive? So this happened fairly recently during COVID times in 2020.

And I talked at the start about how a blackout isn't dangerous if it happens close to the surface because your safety diver gets you. But it is dangerous if it happens at depth. And on this occasion, I had one safety diver. And for a reason that we're still not clear, but it could not have been due to a lack of oxygen. I blacked out at 42 meters, about 140 feet on the way up out of reach of the safety diver. He didn't even see me. He came down to 30 meters, 100 feet on his dive. Couldn't see me.

I already started to like fall back down. And so he went back up to the surface. And once he got to the surface, then he activates the counterbalist. But it takes a while. The plate on this dive was, I was going for a very deep free immersion dive, pulling on the rope. And it was 127 meters, so over 400 feet, like 420 or so. And it takes a long time for the plate to come back up to the depth where I'm falling to and then it catches me and brings me to the surface.

So I fell from 130 down to about 250 feet. Obviously, my eardrums were both blown out. And I'm unconscious for this whole time. The plate catches me and then it brings me to the surface. But at that point, I'd been under the water for about six, almost seven minutes. And a typical dive to this depth shouldn't take more than about four and a half minutes. So it took a while for them. Actually, it didn't take that long for them to resuscitate me considering what I'd been through.

I think it was about a minute before I started breathing again by myself. But it took me a while before I became kind of conscious enough to start having thoughts and memories. And at that point, I realized, because I'd been under for so long, I was experiencing DCS, which is where the nitrogen that's dissolved forms bubble. and becomes a problem. So I had to get back down and do decompression prevention, basically. So breathing oxygen, pure oxygen at depth. And I couldn't feel my leg, couldn't use my legs, couldn't really use my arms properly, couldn't see properly. I could hear very well. And I could think clearly, which is what saved me, because it allowed me to get back under the water,

breathing oxygen. And then everything started to clear up after that. But yeah, I don't have memories of that dive after the turn, so I don't know what happened to make me black out of that depth. And I tried to, I used hypnosis even, got hypnotized by someone to try and remember those thoughts that are lost, but couldn't get there. So that was definitely traumatic because it shook my whole foundation of what I thought was safe diving and force me to kind of. of completely question what I was doing and then how I was doing it as well. So that's definitely the most traumatic event of my career. I mean, that's crazy. And when you dove again the next time after that, those thoughts, I'm sure, are ruminating again in your head. What is the mental battle like to mitigate that? Yeah, that negative thought voice obviously has more ammo at that point, right? So it's a

process again of just building up slowly, taking it easily at first doing dives that are shallow, just to feel the sensations again, to build your confidence back up, and then gradually increasing those depths back up to where I was before. But it took me a month to recover and to kind of process it and to ask myself and my family the question like, should I be doing this? Should I be continuing? and then ultimately when the answer was yes, then I just gradually worked back into it. And they were supportive even after that experience. And I know your wife dives as well now, right?

And so I guess she has a little bit of an understanding where she gets it, right? Yeah, so she's a free diver and she, I think, understands kind of the reason why I am doing what I'm doing and supports it. but I'm sure it is stressful or worrying for her as well so I'm grateful for her support and her kind of patience through that but obviously we had to like change the way that I was training and diving in order to better accommodate for this kind of a potential of yeah of course I mean it is interesting that all that mental training that you did before is ultimately what saved you, that you're still able to be sharp the second, you know, you came to and kind of regain consciousness, that you're able to just be like, hey, I'm back on.

I don't think that's an accident. I don't think that's like a natural thing. I think that's probably due to all the constant training that you've done to stay sharp. Yeah, maybe. But it was a gradual state. Like it was kind of like everything was coming back online slowly. Like the hard drive was slowly being rebooted when I came to. And but yeah, the first thought in my mind was I've got to get back down there with pure oxygen to get rid of this nitrogen.

Do you think you'll ever stop diving? I'll never stop going in the sea and free diving. I'll obviously at some point stop trying to break records and trying to compete. When that will be, who knows. So it's a sport where we definitely peak later in our lives. because it benefits from a slowing down of the metabolism and also from just I guess like a development of calmness which seems to happen more later in your life maybe. But yeah there's there's been athletes like the woman who was dominating the sport 10 years ago

Natalia Mocinova a Russian lady she was in the 50s and still smashing world records. there's a long life in this career. I'm sure the community is probably pretty small as well. So if something happens, you know, some type of tragedy to any of the other divers, does that affect the community? Do you find that people retire after, you know, they see someone close to them pass away or become injured or things like that? It could do, but I haven't seen that as much. We've had a few fatalities. Most of them, people who are close to me.

But I don't see it. having an effect of discouragement on the community. If anything, the sport is growing really quickly right now, especially in America also, but especially in Asia, in countries like Taiwan and South Korea and China. It's going crazy. So we're seeing a lot more people coming into the sport. And obviously, there's people who are retiring, who are dropping out, but on the whole, it's booming. And you would encourage your kids to try it, right? Definitely to try it. I don't them to try anything that's not that's not stupid or unhealthy but you don't see it as so overly dangerous that someone can you know practice at you know intermediate depths and not expose themselves

but still be able to benefit some of the the mental and physical benefits you've you've reaped absolutely yeah and that's where it's most rewarding is just it's not trying to break a record but just going to easy depths and feeling like you are integrated into that aquatic world like you are an aquatic creature yourself. Not just there as a tourist like you are with a scuba tank, but as an actual denizen of that underwater realm. And that's the most beautiful sensation. Yeah. This is kind of blow my mind. I feel like I need to free dive immediately. Definitely try. I encourage everyone to try at least once. What is the process like to start? Like obviously you should never dive alone.

Never dive alone and never even hold your breath in the water alone. That's important too, because you might think, okay, I've got a pool, I can just like jump in and try and hold my breath for a minute or two, especially if you're hyperventilating. If you're doing that technique from before and you do that in a pool, then you are at great risk. So always with someone else who's trained in the free diving techniques. How do you find someone? Like I'm in New York City. I just Google. So there's clubs, but the best thing would be to have someone else who wants to try it as well. And you could go somewhere, come to the Bahamas and try it at Dens Blue Hole or anywhere else, that's good for free diving. And once you have those techniques, then you can keep on training in the pool,

doing the static or the dynamic apnea, or you can do it whenever you go to a holiday destination that's got warm water. That's deep. Is there a specific technique or style that someone should do if they're just starting, like fins, no fins? Is it just personal preference? It's probably better to start with fins. The reason is that, the technique is more basic, it's easier, especially when you're trying to equalize at the same time. As we go down, typically we have to pinch our nose and blow to equalize. And if you're using your hands and feet in a complicated way, it becomes more difficult.

Once you've got that down, then you can progress to diving with just goggles and a nose clip or without anything on your eyes at all, in which case you can use your hands and feet. you can develop the no-fins start. Yeah. But definitely to begin with mask, snorkel, fins, wetsuit if it's cold water, that's all you need. Have you explored other types of like aquatic adventure, like caving? I know obviously you did this, what do they call it,

like a channel swim where it was a bunch of individualized breaths. But have you experienced where, you know, like you go into a cave or like going to like really tight spaces specifically to, try to go through. I've seen videos of people that will like, you try to shimmy through rocks, like underwater kind of thing. Do you try that?

Have you? Yeah, that would be not tight spaces. That wouldn't be my thing. And that would be extremely dangerous on free diving because if you get stuck, then you're screwed. So I have done swimming into caves. And through, there's a famous one in Egypt. There's a blue hole.

And it's got a connection between the blue hole and the ocean that's called the arch. And I was the first person to swim through that without fins or wet suit or anything. Oh, really? It's at a depth of 55 meters, 170 feet, and it's about 100 feet or more through the arch. So you just kind of go down, across and up. And how long is that whole descent? The whole dive takes, I think it took me about three minutes, which isn't too light. Like, it wouldn't be anywhere near as difficult as the record attempts that I've done. What could you hold your breath for? Like just on like an average training day if you were to jump in the water?

The longest I've held my breath without moving static apnea is eight minutes. Eight minutes. But that's not so long on the scale of things. There's people who hold their breath 10 even more minutes. Wow. Those are the specialists with big lung volumes and small body mass. So, so yeah, there's a lot of cave diving. that's incredible like in the sonotes in Mexico, in Yucatan Peninsula.

Those are incredible places to dive in caves. And it's beautiful, but we can't go very deep into the caves, obviously, like a cave diver would. Right. And can most people expand their lung capacity? Like you getting to eight minutes is like, yeah, of course, you're one of the greatest ever. Am I able to get to like four or five minutes with, you know, like let's say six months of training or a year of training? Yeah, yeah, I would definitely get you to four or five minutes in six months, yeah, for sure. Probably more. So as long as you are not a couch potato, you don't have like a heart condition,

then definitely three, four minutes is reachable. And you might even get there on your first day of training. Can I try one minute of breath hold? Sure. Okay. Well, you do it with him? I can, yeah. Here's the thing. If you try it with the Wim Hof with the hyperventilation, it'll be easy. If you try it with my method, it'll be hard, but in the long run, my method will get you a longer breath hold and a safer one as well. Can we try?

And just when you start to experience that urge to breathe, the suffocating feeling, tell yourself it's just information. It's just information about a gas in my body that's building up that's not harmful for me or dangerous and try and treat it as such. treat it as such okay can we try it yeah okay cool are we going for a minute or do just want to do as long as you can i'll probably only be able to do a minute but maybe yeah if i can go long i mean i won't go more than two or three minutes do you want me to do it with you or talk you through it maybe you talk me through it okay yeah yeah talk me through it okay okay

so this is going to be just a pure straight breath hold with no preparation i mean obviously hopefully you're a little relaxed now. In fact, you can kind of make yourself comfortable. And the important thing is that you haven't hyperventilated, so you haven't prepared yourself by lowering the carbon dioxide, which means that you'll start to feel that urge to breathe very quickly. And in fact, if we did a few of these on the second, third, fourth ones, that urge to breathe would be dampened, so you'd be able to go a lot longer.

And I told you before that I could get you to hold your breath for probably three or four minutes in a day, but it's not going to be on the first breath hold, especially like sitting here like this. Of course. So this is just for you to experience that sensation of the urge to breathe and try and detach from it, try and be on the other side of that, that soundproof glass, observe it as information that's coming to your awareness. Great. So for now, yeah, just relax. And then I'll give you a countdown of 10 seconds on after 10 seconds.

take one full breath, breathe into your belly first. It can be through your nose, but at the end, breathe through your mouth. So start with your nose and then at the end to try and maximize your breath, breathe in through the mouth. So no preparation, no breathe up. And 10 seconds from now, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Inhale deep, all the way into your belly, into your lungs. Can you're holding that? Good. So now just relax everything. Relax your arms, relax your shoulders. Your head can fall forwards if you want it to. And I want you just to kind of move through your body from your toes up.

Just making sure that everything is as relaxed as possible. You can kind of wiggle your your toes if you need to. Move your legs. Make sure your legs are completely relaxed. Your hands, your arm, and your arms. your shoulders especially your chest your neck your head and then all the muscles of your face your lips your jaw your eyes relax them completely even your tongue inside your mouth just let that completely relax and probably you're starting to feel just raise one finger if you're feeling an urge to breathe already you are okay remember that's just information it's just CO2 your oxygen levels are still very, very high and you can stay in this place for a lot, lot longer.

This is just information that's coming to your awareness from your bloodstream, from the carbon dioxide in your blood. There's nothing adverse to it. There's no damage or problem. When you feel like you cannot hold your breath any longer, then I want you to slowly count backwards from 10, in your mind and if you get to zero then try and count up from zero to ten at any speed just as slow as possible down from ten hold it a little bit longer you're doing really well you're already at coming up to 150 so I'm sure you'll be able to make it to pass two

minutes that's 155 now time passes a lot slower towards the end a lot quicker towards the end sorry so that's two minutes already you're doing really good challenge yourself to hold it a little bit longer a little bit longer count backwards from five slowly if you can a little bit longer that's good really good doing really good two minutes 15 there hold a little bit more 10 seconds you can do this 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 that's 2 minutes 30 amazing Good stuff. That is actually really good to hold two and a half minutes. No, seriously, I mean, it doesn't sound like a lot to you because you've heard about eight minute breath holds.

But with never having done it before and doing two and a half minutes with no preparation like that is good. Like if you were to now relax, lie down, spend three minutes relaxed and then try another one, you'd probably go to 3.30 or something like that. And if you tried another one after that, you might get close to four minutes. How far did I go? 2.30. Wow. That's really good.

That's really good. That's a weird feeling, bro. When you're getting to that end and you feel your whole body like convulsing, like you could see me convulsing, right? Like what's happening there? You have what are called breathing reflexes where your body is spontaneously trying to breathe in, but you don't let the air come in. And so it kind of has this effect of convulsing your chest.

Does that go away once you start training? Or does it just come up later? It comes later, but it never goes away. I'll have those from, if I do this kind of a breath hole, they'll start at about that time, like 2.30 or 3. Right. And I have them all the way through to eight minutes. Wow.

But you've got to try and maintain your relaxation through that phase as well. Wow. But no, I'm serious, that is actually pretty good to be able to do 230 in that kind of circumstances. So you could definitely, that's enough to go 100 feet more. 100 feet? Yeah, free diving. So then it will become, in order to get to that 100 feet, you obviously need to learn the techniques of the movement and equalization. Expenditure of all my things and everything like that.

Yeah, so it's not just an instantaneous thing. But you definitely have the breath hold in order to fund a dive to that depth. And then with training, yeah, most people should be able to get past that as well. So eight minutes for me is kind of close to my limit with a lot of training because, as I said, I don't have a huge lung volume. Do you think human beings, I know you mentioned that we might be getting close kind of to the depths that we can go naturally and that we're probably nearing that point? Do you think that there's just a threshold where it's like humans can't go past this?

Or do you think we'll continue to find ways to break it and that generations to come, you know, like with most sports, things will get more competitive, we'll find different advantages and different ways to, you know, excel. So with the Novens discipline, there's no equipment. And so there's nothing kind of technical that's going to advance there other than the wetsuit. But I use an orca wet suit that's pretty much as good as it's going to get. it's the best suit. Nothing else other than that.

So it just all comes down to the human body. And will we ever dive to 200 meters? No, fins? No. 150? No. The record's 102 now. Will we dive to 103?

Of course. Someone will do it someday. But you don't think 150? Not 150. Because when the record was 80 meters, people said we couldn't dive further than that, and then you proved that to be. Yeah, but I always had,

so when the record was when I started, the record was 60 and I had a dream to dive to 76 meters, 250 feet on my 25th birthday. And by the time I turned 25, the record was then at 80 meters. So I said, okay, I'm going to try and get to 300 feet, 300 feet, two bare feet, one breath of air, which is 92 meters, so a lot more. And then when I got to that, I was like, okay, I can get to 100 meters. It's another 8 meters. But this whole process is kind of like a plateauing effect.

So to get to 100 meters took me about the same time as it did to get from 100 to just 102, like that extra meter. There's little efficiency gains. Yeah. And I have, I mean, I'm sure I can go deeper than that with a bunch of, like if I spent the next two years only training and only focusing on that discipline, maybe I can add on another meter. So we can go deeper, but it's just into this gray area of decreasing probability.

And you really feel that extra meter. Like as you're swimming down, in my mind, it's like it's one more, one more kick. That's all. Or I guess it's two more if you're going one meter. Go come back up as well.

Yeah, exactly. But I'm like, it's so little to add. But as you're going, are you ever like reaching the bottom and you're like that's farther than I've ever gone like are you even thinking about that are you thinking about it pops into your head yeah but you just again you schedule it delay it just detach from it because you can't be thinking about even positive things like this is this is great I'm I'm at the deepest I've ever been but you still have to swim back up right

yeah what what is that I'm really curious I don't know if I have a solid answer for like what that mental processes as you're approaching that plate and you're about to break a record and you've gone farther than any human has ever gone just with two legs and you know two feet in a breath it's not positive it's not like oh i'm going to do it i'm the greatest it's not oh i'm i suck you better not die like what is happening um detaching again so so just um focusing on what i'm doing in that moment or even just giving my brain something that's just like the most menial simple task for it to do so on the way up counting strokes. I take about from 100 feet to 100 meters through under feet takes about 30, 33 strokes, kicks and arm strokes.

And you'll literally just count. You just go one, two, three. And the thing is that your brain has slowed down so much that even just that one process takes up all of its kind of capacity. And often I will lose count. And I'll be like one. two, two, like, did I just say three? Okay, two again. And I end up getting to the surface, having counted 12 strokes when I've actually done, because I can check on my depth gauge, I've done 33. So, but just the fact that you're kind of giving it this task, this super easy task, or it could be just like humming the most basic tune melody in your head, that is enough to keep it occupied and not get sucked into all this other thinking.

It's kind of like giving a pacifier to a kid. hilarious. You're like, yeah, just play with this. It's like a fidget spinner for your brain. Just fidget with something. Do something while I'm focused on breaking a record. Yeah. I think it's so crazy.

What song do you hone? Do you have a specific point in mind? Well, there's these church bells and the town bells and the town where they used to live in Italy when I was training there. Just the most simple, like I think it's three notes. And so I just kind of hum that in my head. Oh, that's so wild. Yeah.

I mean, this has been so fun. I really appreciate you coming out and chatting with me. Genuinely, this has been really, really exciting. I'm going to think a lot about that stomach breathing and like focusing on channeling anxiety, detaching from the thoughts entering my head and really trying to just observe them and schedule them for later. Yeah. Think about it, but also try and, again, make it an immune system. Right.

So program it into your subcontact. just yeah that's the game changer that will make it a permanent thing rather than just like something that you have to remember to do yeah now you have uh the documentary out that's uh it's awesome breathe right that's an old one now um there's some new ones coming out this year and actually i just did one where i was teaching orlando bloom how to free dive oh really that should be really fun how was he he was pretty good he's a um he's a uh driven but stuff like like what's the like obsessively kind of overachieving guy so it was a good experience for him I think because he had to tame that side of him that was kind of trying to to go further go deeper

oh interesting how deep did he end up going he went deep went to 42 meters or 40 40 meters I think pulling on the rope and he reached out to you and was like hey I would love to do this and came to the Bahamas last year just after vertical blue our event. And we only had like two or three days. And we had a film crew who were breaking our balls the whole time as well. So I think that he, like if he had a solid week without the crew following him, he would go deeper and do better, which shows that like someone who's in good shape and healthy. Driven.

Yeah. I mean, maybe he has some natural ability as well. but I feel like it's within the reach of everyone. Like anyone can start the sport and draw from it the same sensations that I do when I'm going to these debts. Yeah, and that's an important note. I don't need to be the best. I don't need to break some record. I can just do a very average, regular amount and still reap some of the benefits of mindfulness.

100%. Yeah. Yeah. And then you also have a memoir that's out. Oxygen. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's sold out in print,

but it's available on Amazon and, on in digital format and I need to, everyone's been telling me I have to record it on audible because it's the new thing. So maybe I'll see if I can do that. Let me record it. Let me record it for you. You want to read it? Thank you. I'm going to do it in my accent, you know. I think I'm going to nail it. Just not the Aussie accent. Fine. I'll figure out how to do a Kiwi one. I'll do a little bit with that. But thank you again. I really appreciate this. Thank you so much. Thank you much. And yeah, I'll let you head over to the airport so you can get back to the Bahamas, all right. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Cheers.