#860: Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life

**Tim Ferriss** (0:12)
I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton. Michelle, at long last, here we are.

**Michelle Khare** (0:27)
Here we are.

**Tim Ferriss** (0:28)
So nice to meet you in person.

**Michelle Khare** (0:30)
It's so nice to meet you too. This is so exciting and surreal for me. So thank you for letting me infiltrate your podcast studio today.

**Tim Ferriss** (0:37)
Absolutely, I am thrilled. It looks like about three years ago that I first put you and your channel in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday. And I think it was probably even before that, that one of our mutual friends, Adam Grant, had been telling me repeatedly, you have to have Michelle on the show. And the reason that I was so excited to put you in the newsletter, I don't even remember the line, I went back and I looked at what I said exactly. And one of the things I said was I'm so happy that someone finally cracked sort of this premise and did it right. But since people probably have no idea what I'm talking about, although I would have already said something in the intro, what's the log line, so to speak?

**Michelle Khare** (1:32)
Of Challenge Accepted?

**Tim Ferriss** (1:33)
Of Challenge Accepted, what is it?

**Michelle Khare** (1:35)
So Challenge Accepted is a show where I attempt the world's toughest stunts and professions, and that can range from learning and attempting Harry Houdini's deadliest trick, the water torture cell, to training with the Secret Service for a week, to most recently, I recreated Tom Cruise's stunt for Mission Impossible, where I was hanging off the side of a military aircraft as it was taking off.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:04)
And you have more than 6 million followers, more than a billion views, and I'm going to read, you know what? We'll probably just skip the intro, because I'm basically getting into it anyway. Michelle hopes to prove that with enough dedication and failure, anything is possible. And that's one of the characteristics that I most appreciate about the show, is if you have a breakdown, if you're flat on your back, if you stumble and fall, it's in there. That's a feature and not a bug. So it's not just the highlights, it's also the lowlights. And since we're already getting into it, I'm just going to read this paragraph. All right. Michelle's work has earned multiple Streamy Awards, including Show of the Year, has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Vogue India and more. In 2025, Challenge Accepted made history, congratulations, successfully petitioning to join the Primetime Emmy Ballot. Michelle was named a Time 100 Honorary for her impact as a creator and storyteller.
Let's rewind way back, we were chatting a little bit before we got started about Shreveport, Louisiana.

**Michelle Khare** (3:13)
Oh yes, shout out Shreveport.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:16)
And I mentioned I had been there and you were like, oh, I'm so sorry.

**Michelle Khare** (3:19)
Yes, there's not much there.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:23)
Why was I there? Why had I been there? And why does that tie into your background a little bit, your history growing up? If you wanna hop into it, because I'll, so as to answer my own question, which is the reason I was in Shreveport is because they have very compelling tax incentives and other incentives for filming, right? So what was your first exposure to sort of the business, broadly speaking, in air quotes?

**Michelle Khare** (3:47)
My very first exposure to the business was my dad is a big, big movie and television lover. He actually learned English after immigrating from India by watching films, even on the plane from India to America. So growing up, because there's not much to do in Shreveport, every Friday night we were at the movies. Didn't matter if it was a blockbuster or a very low rated Rotten Tomatoes B-side movie. I saw everything. Kids movies, PG-13, we saw it all. And then we would go to a pizza shop and talk about the movie afterwards.
Again, there's nothing to do in Shreveport. So this was like the pinnacle of entertainment. And so just naturally, I started experiencing a home grown little film school, if that makes sense. We printed out the AFI Top 100 movies and had them in our living room and we would check them off as we watched them, me and my dad. And what was special is as I got a little older, all these tax incentives started happening, bringing films to New Orleans and to Shreveport. We got a lot of like Twilight knockoff movies. I think one of the scary movies was shot in Shreveport. And so our town sort of experienced this little economic art renaissance, which was really exciting. And so all of our friends and family members were becoming extras in movies and TV shows and feeling, you know, very excited about all of that. And so one of my first jobs was I had an internship on a movie starring The Rock. It was a movie called Snitch. It came out in 2013 And I think I was like so low on the call sheet. I was like, it was after all the PAs, it was PA intern. It was the last person on the call sheet was me. And I was just getting coffee for people and learning. And it was an incredible experience. And I love that because I got a window into the traditional scope of what it could take to tell a story at a higher Hollywood level. And that's what I hope to bring a lot of to what we do, even on Challenge Accepted today, is this midpoint of digital freedom, ownership, but structure and understanding and respect of the history of where our visual storytelling medium has come from.