Escaping Houdini's Water Torture Cell in Six Weeks: Michelle Khare's Attempt
Michelle Khare
Michelle Khare set out to escape the Chinese Water Torture Cell, the stunt Harry Houdini made famous and which she calls one of the deadliest in magic. She would be submerged upside down, handcuffed, with a single breath to get out. She is not a magician. She gave herself six weeks to learn lock picking from escape artists and breath-holding from free divers, then perform the escape in front of an audience. The video asks whether someone outside the magic world can pull this off in that time, and she spends much of it unsure she can.
The Original Trick
Khare explains that more than a century ago Houdini would be suspended upside down with his feet locked in stocks, then lowered into a tank filled to the brim with water. He had to escape from the locked cell before his breath ran out, and he performed the stunt until his death on Halloween night 1926. To replicate it, she would need to hold her breath for several minutes and pick real locks while inverted and underwater.
Breath Training and Its Dangers
Her breath coach is free diver Lance Lee-Davis, whom she introduces as a Guinness World Record holder. The first exercise is segmented breathing, which builds up to a peak inhale. You fill the belly as full as possible, then the chest, then lift the shoulders to add lung volume. Next comes purge breathing, a faster exhale on a count ("Purge, two, three, four"), cycling through diaphragm, chest, and shoulders.
Khare explains that purge breathing prepares the body for a breath hold by expelling CO2. Done correctly, she says, it can improve a breath hold. Done unsupervised in water, it can lead to loss of consciousness and, in some cases, shallow-water death. She calls it some of the most dangerous training she has attempted. Lee-Davis explains that when oxygen levels drop far enough, a person becomes hypoxic and may have mild seizures. Loss of consciousness is the main safety concern, Lee-Davis says, "cuz that's how people actually drown." Lee-Davis acts as her safety for every session.
During one hold, Khare's body starts jerking. Lee-Davis identifies these as contractions and says that's healthy. The advice is to accept the discomfort, which Lee-Davis frames with the Marine saying "embrace the suck." Khare admits she isn't feeling confident and finds it daunting how much she has to learn in a few weeks.
Learning Handcuffs at the Magic Castle
Breath work was only half the problem. Khare also had to become confident picking real locks and handcuffs. She was invited to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, an exclusive club run by the Academy of Magical Arts, to meet escapologist Gabriella Lester. Lester started doing stage shows at 12. At 14 she became one of the youngest people ever to do the upside-down straitjacket escape, and at 18 she made her first TV appearance on Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
Lester explains how double-locking handcuffs work. The first lock engages when the cuff closes and stops it from coming off the wrist. The second is an extra lock set from the back of the key, which pushes a bar so the spring can't move and the teeth are fixed. Lester describes the ratchet as "two staircases going in a different direction": the opposing teeth are what stop the cuff from opening back up. To defeat it you need a shim, a flat piece of metal slipped between the teeth. Here the shim is a bobby pin. Khare learns to do it on her own wrist, palm up and against her body, pushing the pin in and lifting with the other finger. She gets one cuff open and jokes that she has no idea how she'll do this upside down underwater.
Lester connects this to Houdini's own start. He worked in a locksmith's shop, which Lester describes as his core roots as a performer. Lester thinks Khare should likewise begin with simple fundamentals before moving up to the tank, despite how complex lock picking can get.
Houdini as a Bundle of Unrelated Skills
Khare says she knew none of Houdini's history before the project. She lists what she learned: before becoming a magician he was an amateur boxer and lived on the road with a traveling circus, and some people theorize he helped the Secret Service identify counterfeiters. She draws a parallel to her own series, in which she takes on a string of unrelated challenges. Houdini, she says, took seemingly random skills, bundled them together, and created something bigger than himself. This becomes the theme she returns to at the end.
Underwater Practice and Panic
She then needed to learn the quirks of different padlock models and brands and work them underwater. Her first underwater sessions were in a fish tank in her backyard, and they felt completely different from cuffs on dry land because her body was buoyant.
The hardest part, she says, was avoiding panic. Lee-Davis explains that as a free diver Lee-Davis never thinks about holding breath or about time, and simply stays in the moment. Khare finds the opposite: she has to stay calm while knowing the clock is running, and "the first moment something goes wrong I start freaking out." A backyard tank could only take her so far, and she needed a full-size cell.
Building a Tank With Mark Rober
You can't buy a water torture cell. To her team's knowledge only a few exist, and the video shows one selling at auction for $300,000. So she assembled a team to build her own, which brought her to engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober at CrunchLabs. Rober agreed and asked her to "make it doable."
At what Khare called "the Magician's Brain Trust," she framed the goal: do something like Houdini's trick, but, like a good magician, add to and transform it and make it her own. Houdini performed behind a curtain. He was lowered in, a curtain went up, and a few minutes later he appeared standing on top of the tank, so nobody saw him inside. Modern performers have done it in full view, and Khare wanted no curtain. Rober agreed that a hundred years on, visibility is the way to go.
Then the brainstorming escalated: piranhas, electric eels, sharks, a spinning tank with a 360-degree view, a tank suspended in the air with glass top and bottom, a tank within a tank, flame bars, and toasters and hair dryers slowly lowered toward the water as time ran out. Rober sketched a piranha tank with a trap door. Someone noted you're not allowed to transport piranhas across state lines and added, "don't ask me how I know that."
The wilder the ideas got, Khare says, the more the whole thing felt like a gimmick. The group decided the heart of the illusion was already there: the real risk of drowning. One participant described "Lady Houdini" Kristen, who has done the escape more than 600 times. During one halftime performance she had a mini seizure, had to be helped out, and nearly died. Their point was that even after hundreds of repetitions, being underwater and spinning around for more than a minute gets to you. Even with a rescuer standing by, a rescue still takes time.
After two hours they settled on five elements:
- No curtain. The escape happens in full view with no visual trickery.
- Handcuffs on her wrists.
- A padlocked steel chain binding her arms.
- A lid that doubles as a foot stockade, restraining her feet.
- A final padlock locking the tank from the outside.
The trick in the design is that once she picks the lock by her ankles, she frees the leg shackles. She can then reach her hands through two holes in the top to find the final lock. Rober gave it his "seal of approval." Asked about the budget, Khare said they were "going to find out." It turned out to be very expensive.
The First Full Run: Two and a Half Minutes
Khare lays out the four obstacles: handcuffs, a padlock with chains, a padlock on the inside of the lid, and the lock at her feet on the outside of the lid. Her active breath hold, meaning a hold while moving and spending energy, was about 90 seconds. Ideally she would get through every lock in under 60 seconds. On her first attempt at all of them back to back, out of the water, it took two and a half minutes. She concluded she needed to either greatly improve her breath hold or get much faster at picking locks, and soon, because the built tank was two days away.
Hanging Upside Down: The Stunt Team's Test
When the fabricated tank arrived, safety became the focus. The team brought in Steve Brown, whom Khare introduces as being on the Avatar stunt team. Brown describes performing underwater as very scary and calls the stunt something only a select few people in the industry can do. Brown admits being a little nervous and says, "I don't know anyone who has done this that's not a magician." Brown's job that day was to find anything that could go wrong before it actually happened.
Khare was hoisted upside down by her ankles in the stockade lid. She says nothing about it is comfortable or calm, with blood and pressure rushing to her head. She felt pressure on the backs of her Achilles tendons and the tops of her feet, and worried about splinters from the wooden part. Brown suggested keeping the setup as is, since some discomfort is unavoidable when your full body weight hangs from your ankles. She also had to test whether she could do an inverted sit-up, which she would need in order to reach the padlock on the inside of the lid that frees her feet. She stresses that this was one of her only chances to train with the tank before the performance.
Fighting the Clock and Getting Worse
As training went on, Khare grew frustrated because her breath-hold times were getting worse. She was working on two kinds of holds. In a static hold you hold your breath and power your body down completely. In an active hold you keep moving. On a bad day, Lee-Davis told her to acknowledge it wasn't her best and said the worst days often teach the most.
She describes "the enemy of the clock" as her central struggle. She calls herself very goal-oriented and wants to hit specific times. Being told to stop thinking about the clock and let herself float away "sounds nice in a yoga class and it's absolutely awful when you can't breathe." Lee-Davis said her body language showed her letting the feeling overwhelm her, and that trying is fighting, which is the wrong response in those moments. Khare said she felt she had to muscle through to relax. Lee-Davis answered that she couldn't take the athlete's approach and knuckle down. She had to submit to it.
One of her coaches said it would be hard for her to get out of her own head and pointed to a line attributed to Houdini: "my brain is the key that sets me free." Once Khare could work that kind of inner monologue into her head, the coach said, she would be great at this.
A Static Record and the Active-Hold Gap
Eventually she hit 3:38 on a static hold. She notes that Houdini's personal record is reported as 3 minutes 30 seconds. She immediately qualifies it: a static number might mean nothing for the final challenge, because what counts is the active hold, which is naturally shorter. Her active hold was then around a minute and a half.
To close the gap, Lee-Davis added hypoxic cardio, exercise intervals done without breathing, which Lee-Davis calls CO2 tolerance training. Khare practiced holding her breath as long as possible while moving through an obstacle course. Her active hold rose to an average of about two minutes. Her question was whether she could pick four locks upside down in the tank in two minutes.
Rehearsal: Tapping Out at 1:30
The day before the performance, the full team ran a rehearsal with the props in place and the tank set for an inverted entry. Before going in, she was suspended from the lid and moved over the tank to practice breath holds upside down. Several problems surfaced. The iron stockade was carrying almost her entire body weight by the ankles, which she called extremely painful, and someone suggested adding foam around her ankles. They checked whether she could hear time callouts over a walkie-talkie. When she opened her eyes, the lights disoriented her. She says these are details an audience never notices but that have an "astronomical" effect, and the team had 24 hours to fix them.
The rehearsal also clarified the math. Her breath hold starts the moment she is lowered in, before the escape has really begun. Getting into the tank costs about 20 seconds. That leaves about 1:40 for the locks, roughly 25 seconds per lock, which she says is very fast lock picking with no room for error.
She did not escape. She tapped out at 1:30. Afterward she described "an immense sense of impostor syndrome": she isn't Houdini, and who did she think she was trying this. After six weeks of training she wasn't even hitting her pool benchmarks, and she would get one shot the next day.
The Final Performance
The performance was staged like a magic show, hosted by Sam Reich. Backstage, Khare mentions reading an entire book about Houdini in a day and quotes her favorite line: Houdini's willingness to try anything came from his insatiable thirst for knowledge of every part of show business and his shrewd ability to take unrelated skills and use them to his advantage. Before she went on, Lee-Davis reminded her that once she lay on the table the world would be hers, everything would slow to her pace, and each breath in and out would be a release.
Reich opened with a safety notice, asking the audience to stay calm and remain seated if anything went wrong, since rescue and medical teams were standing by. He took the keys with him. He told the audience her rehearsal breath hold had maxed out at two minutes and that anything past that could spell disaster. He also warned YouTube viewers not to try this at home.
After the countdown she went into the water and the timer started. Following Reich's commentary: she first pulled a bobby pin from her wardrobe and unbent it to pick the cuffs. The first cuff came off quickly. The second gave her more trouble, but she got it. The chest padlock, which Reich said had given her the most trouble in rehearsals, slowed her again before she opened it. Then she had to get the chains off over her head. At 1:30 elapsed the chain was still causing trouble, then it came free. Two locks remained, at her feet and on the tank. Reich noted they were "dangerously close to 2 minutes," beyond anything she had done in rehearsal. The leg shackles came off, leaving only the lid lock, with the safety team standing by. The transcript ends the escape with applause but doesn't state a final time.
What She Took From It
Khare closes on the theme she picked up from Houdini's biography. She says he taught her how to find power in packaging the skills that make you who you are, and that anyone can succeed no matter how obscure or random their talents seem. Her series has often left her feeling like "a jack of all trades and the master of none." She says she is starting to see how that can often be better than being a master of one.
I am going to attempt to escape Harry Houdini's deadliest trick, the water torture cell. You're going to do this? Yeah. What? Yeah, whatever you come up with.
Known as one of the deadliest stunts in magic, I will be submerged upside down, handcuffed, and have only a single breath to make my escape. I don't know anyone who has done this that's not a magician. This is what you always do.
Over the next six weeks, I will be training with magicians to learn how to pick locks. There you go. And world-class freedivers to learn how to hold my breath for minutes at a time. For those of you watching on YouTube, do not try this at home. Any longer than two minutes on that clock could spell disaster.
Sorry. Yeah, it's okay. I was so in my head. I was just thinking about the whole time, how am I supposed to do this with handcuffs on? God, how long was I under for? Like 45 seconds.
So if you think about stuff like that, you will get in your head and freak yourself out. And whenever you're training, I want you to have that mindset: no, I control this. It's on my terms. That's how you're going to nail your stunt. Okay, I'm ready. All right.
Over 100 years ago, legendary magician and escape artist Harry Houdini invented what has become known as one of the greatest magic stunts ever devised by man. Houdini would be suspended upside down with his feet locked in stocks and lowered into a tank filled to the brim with water. The challenge was for him to escape from the locked, water-filled cell before running out of breath. And Houdini captivated audiences with this stunt until his death on Halloween night, 1926. In order to replicate the success of Houdini's trick, over the next six weeks, I'll have to train to hold my breath for multiple minutes at a time.
What we're going to do is we're going to work our way up to a peak inhale using what we call the segmented breathing exercise. You're going to fill your belly as full as you can make it, then fill the chest. If I lift my shoulders, I increase the volume of my lungs.
I learned there's actually a technique to help extend your breath hold to superhuman lengths, used by endurance artists like David Blaine, but more commonly by freedivers, including Guinness World Record holder Lance Lee-Davis.
We're going to do some purge breathing on this one, and this is a faster exhale. And purge, two, three, four. Inhale and purge, two, three, four. Diaphragm, chest, shoulders.
Purge breathing refers to a technique used to prepare the body for a breath hold by expelling your body's CO2. When done correctly, you can increase oxygen intake, thus improving your breath hold. However, if done in the water unsupervised, purge breathing can lead to loss of consciousness and, in some cases, shallow-water death, making this some of the most dangerous training I've ever attempted.
If our oxygen levels get low enough, we become hypoxic. The individual would start to have little mild seizures. Loss of consciousness is a pretty big safety concern because that's how people actually drown. I'm going to be safing you, and that's all I do.
Good, and breathe. Dang. Breathe, breathe, breathe. There were moments where, did you feel you were kind of like this? Those might have been contractions. While you may not love that feeling, as the Marines say, you want to embrace the suck. And so what we mean is—so that's healthy? Yes. That's okay? Yes.
I'm not feeling super confident right now, if I'm fully honest. It's really daunting to imagine how much I have to learn and grow in just the next couple weeks.
But breath work is only one piece of the puzzle. For my final performance, I will need to be confident in picking real locks and handcuffs. To learn this, I was lucky enough to be invited to the world-famous Magic Castle, an exclusive club run by the Academy of Magical Arts in Hollywood, where only members and guests are allowed inside. Today I'm meeting with Gabriella Lester, who is one of the Magic Castle's up-and-coming escapologists.
I started doing stage shows when I was 12 and then became one of the youngest to ever do the upside-down straitjacket escape when I was 14. Last year, when I was 18, I went on TV for the first time to do Penn & Teller's Fool Us. Gabriella Lester.
These are the same things. These are both real handcuffs. They're what you call double-locking handcuffs, because there's two different ways to lock them. So first would be when you just close it, it locks, and that prevents removing it all, keeps it on your wrist. And the second is an extra lock that just goes on the back, which is what the back of the key is for. It pushes that bar in, allowing the double lock to press down the spring, which means these teeth can't move anymore.
It's like two staircases going in a different direction. So when the teeth go in, what prevents them from going back out is the fact that there's another set of these going the opposite direction. So in order to pick them, you need a flat piece of metal, which we call a shim. We're going to be using a bobby pin to put a little flat piece in between. This bobby pin can slide in like that, and that's what allows you to slide this in and out and get it off your wrist.
Whoa. Should I try it on my wrist now? Yeah, you should. Awesome. No idea how I'm going to do this upside down underwater, but one step at a time. Baby steps. Baby steps. You're going for two wrists. Okay, awesome. What else are we to do? Just go for it. You're in it.
Okay, so you're going to take that flat side, put it in there like this. I'll do it on my wrist at the same time. So palm up on the scent and put it against your body like that. And then what you're going to do is put the bobby pin in there, and you're going to push these down at the same time.
Push those down. You've got it. Just feel it and then bring it up with your other finger. That's it. You got one. So you've got a little more movement now because this hand is out. So whatever you need to just feel comfortable.
Houdini, when he started, worked in the locksmith shop, and that was his core roots of where he grew as a performer. No cuffs could hold him. No locks could hold him. No prison cell, no person. So I think it's important for Michelle to start in the beginning. They're really, really simple things, even though there are many complexities in the worlds of lock picking, and then eventually make it up to the tank. That's okay.
I didn't know any of this history of Houdini when we set out to do this project. Well, let me tell you, Houdini had so many lives before he was a magician. He was an amateur boxer. He lived on the road with a traveling circus. And some people theorized that he was actually helping the Secret Service identify counterfeit coins. Sound familiar? Houdini was able to take all of these seemingly random skill sets, bundle them all together, and create something that was bigger than himself. There you go. All right, so do you want a job?
But to make my big escape, I won't just need to know handcuffs. I'll also need to learn the nuances of different models and brands of padlocks. And on top of that, I'll have to be able to do it underwater.
So already this feels totally different from any other time I've done handcuffs because my body is buoyant. This is hard. The thing I'm struggling with the most is avoiding panic.
So as a freediver, I never think about the fact that I'm holding my breath, and I never think about time, and I'm just in the moment.
When I'm stressed, I like to breathe. And in this, I have to remain calm underwater while I know the clock is ticking. The first moment something goes wrong, I start freaking out. That's not going to be good for me for the real thing.
But training in a fish tank in my backyard can only get me so far, and I realized I needed to start training in a full-size tank as soon as possible. The only problem is that you can't just walk into a store and buy a water torture cell because, to our knowledge, there are only a few of these tanks in existence.
285, going to make it now $300,000. I have—bang, it's sold at $300,000.
And so I need to assemble a team to build my very own water torture cell, which brings us to CrunchLabs. You're going to do this? Yeah. What, or a version of this? Yeah, whatever you come up with. So make it doable, please. Oh, man.
In case you live under a rock, Mark Rober is the internet's greatest engineer, responsible for some of the most viral inventions of our time, making him the perfect person to help design our stunt. And to do this, he invited us to his larger-than-life engineering lab, where all the real magic happens.
Thank you, everyone, for being here at what I am calling the Magician's Brain Trust. I think you're a magician in your own right, Mark, at this point. Yeah, and I'm so excited about this. This is not scripted at all. This is really going to be a thing. We're coming in cold. I'm so excited.
The objective of today's meeting is to solve a problem. Harry Houdini created the water torture cell. I want to do something similar to that, but, like a good magician, be additive and transformative to it and really make it my own.
The original trick by Harry Houdini was actually performed behind a curtain. So he was lifted into the air, lowered into the tank, a curtain would come up, a few minutes later, and he'd be standing on top of it. When Houdini performed it, no one really saw him inside of the tank when he did the performance. So when we brought it into newer times, people have started doing it in full view. So I would like to go no curtain with whatever we do. Yeah, and I'd say visibility is the way to go. It's 100 years in the future. You can't cover what you're doing with a curtain. Yeah.
But we wanted to brainstorm to see if we could push the stunt just a bit further. Piranhas, perhaps. Electric eels. Oh, yes. Sharks. These are amazing ideas.
What if we were spinning the whole thing as well, but also give people a 360 view that there's no funny business behind? If it's in the air, it's never been done where it's been visible from all angles. You've had around the tank, but if you have it suspended and it's glass top and bottom...
We have a tank within a tank. You go in the tank, and then they start filling the outer tank with C. What if you had flame bars that were coming down at the same time? Oh my God. What if we do electrocution? You put in toasters and hair dryers that will drop down in time, right? They're slowly coming down water as the time goes down, right?
But like all good engineers, Mark started getting a bit carried away. Two tanks like this with hungry piranhas, with a trapdoor. This trapdoor would come up, and they would come in. Of course, you got the toaster coming down this way. I will say, you're not allowed to transport piranhas across state lines. Don't ask me how I know that. Are you filming this in California? The worst.
But the crazier that our ideas became, the more the whole thing started feeling like a gimmick, and we realized that the heart of the illusion was in front of us all along.
Is there a way to sell the real risk, that you would be in trouble if you didn't get out yourself? Realistically, it's just drowning. Lady Houdini, Kristen, she has done it over 600 times, and she was doing a halftime performance where she had a mini seizure during her performance. They had to help get her out, and she almost died doing that. Even if you've done it hundreds and hundreds of times, you're swirling around, you're underwater for more than a minute, it gets to you. Even if someone's there to come and save you, it's still going to take them time. There's a real risk here. It's not super safe.
And after two long hours, here is what we finally decided. Number one, taking away the curtain so the stunt is done in full view with no visual trickery. Number two, adding handcuffs to restrain my wrists. Number three, adding a padlocked steel chain to bind my arms. Number four, designing the lid to be a foot stockade to restrain my feet. And number five, locking the tank with one final padlock from the outside.
He was a genius inventor, and many people forget that now in time because you kind of lose it in history. That's why his success was so prominent at the time.
The genius of this design is that when I pick the lock by my ankles, I can free and open the leg shackles. Now I can reach my hands through the two holes on the top to find the final lock. Isn't that cool? Does this have the Mark Rober seal of approval? The Mark Rober banger seal of approval? 100%. Okay, cool. I think we're done here. What is your budget for this, by the way? We're going to find out.
Well, we did find out, and the cost to build this thing is very expensive. And so I want to thank the sponsor of this video, SoFi, the all-in-one personal finance app, who's also helping me give away $10,000 to one of you watching this video.
Okay, so these are the four obstacles I'm going to have to overcome in the tank. We have a pair of handcuffs, a padlock and chains, a padlock on the interior of the lid, and a lock at my feet on the exterior of the lid. My active breath hold right now is at about 90 seconds, which isn't the best. So ideally, I need to move through all of the locks in less than 60 seconds. And right now, I'm going to try all of them back to back to back for the first time. Let's do it. We going? Go. Oh, okay.
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This one is so annoying. Got it. But the coolest part about SoFi is that they're actually helping me give away $10,000 to one of you guys watching to pursue whatever your ambition is. And I really hope that it's not this. But to enter, all you got to do is go to the link in the description, or you can scan the QR code that's on the screen right now to enter for your chance to win the $10,000.
This one is the one underneath the lid. By the way, you just got to make sure to use my link because it's the only way to enter for a chance to win the $10,000. Okay, there we go. Thank you so much to SoFi for sponsoring this portion of the video and literally making this whole operation possible.
How long was that? Two and a half minutes. Oh my God. I either need to improve my breath hold significantly or get way faster at picking locks, and hopefully soon, because in two days from now, I'm going to see the built tank for the first time.
Oh no. Oh no. After so many weeks of meeting after meeting after meeting, we finally get to see a version of the fabricated tank, an opportunity for me to get inside and feel what it's like to be in there. Hi, I'm Michelle. It's nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hi. Hi. Magic is a team sport, I'm realizing.
The biggest element of all of this, however, is safety. And so we brought in Steve Brown, who is on the Avatar stunt team. We've done a ton of water work, from under the water to on fire above to things in the sky, fighting, falling. Say, in Avatar, when you're performing underwater, it is very scary.
This is a very, very specialized trick that only a select few in the industry, let alone the world, can do. And the fact that Michelle has taken it on, I'm a little nervous. I don't know anyone who has done this that's not a magician. But this is you. This is what you always do.
Oh my God, there it is. What's up? So this was your creation. Holy smokes. It's kind of heavy. You take the lock out. So this is a very great day for testing. Yeah, it's time to go up.
So my role today in this test is to make sure that anything that could possibly go wrong, we've identified that potential issue before it could actually happen. Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that Michelle is safe and able to live and breathe another day.
Hi. Hi. She's in. If you feel discomfort, you just tell me, and I'll tell him to stop and slowly bring it back down. Okay. Going up.
There is nothing comfortable and calm about being hung upside down. You have all that blood and pressure rushing to your head, so there's a whole series of things that is adding to the stress. Are you okay? Yeah. And hold. Can I just hang here for a bit? Yeah. And if you feel comfortable once you've had a few moments, obviously sitting up is very difficult from this position, but knowing
What it's going to be like in your reach. And the reason I'll need to be capable of an inverted sit-up is because there will be a padlock on the inside of the lid that I'll have to pick in order to free my feet.
Good. Yeah, I mean, I obviously feel pressure on the back of my Achilles and then the top of my foot.
Yeah, we'll get her down, and then put your hands down, and then slowly bring your body forward.
Okay, the wooden part, I just don't want to get a splinter or cut myself when I'm pulling my— We're going to finish. We should keep it as is, because even with that little bit of discomfort, your full body weight's hanging by your ankles, which it normally doesn't do.
So just to clarify, the first thing, I'll just get there, feel it, and then we're going to test pushing the door open. Yes.
It's really important for me to familiarize myself with the tank and work out any kinks now because this is one of the only times I get to train with the tank before my final performance.
Two, three, four, five.
But I was getting increasingly frustrated because my breath-hold times were actually starting to get worse. On one hand, I'm focusing on static breath holds, and the other, I'm working on active breath holds. A static breath hold is where you hold your breath and completely power your body down.
One minute. It should be stressful. Twenty-eight, minute fifteen, one minute. We're going to just acknowledge that this isn't the best day. That's okay. Sometimes the worst days teach us the most of what we need to improve.
Confronting this enemy of the clock is really difficult for me to do. I'm a very goal-oriented person. I want to hit certain times, and being told, "Stop thinking about the clock and just let yourself float away," sounds nice in a yoga class, and it's absolutely awful when you can't breathe.
I can see it in your body language that you're letting it just rapidly overwhelm you. Trying is fighting, and fighting is not what we want to do in these moments.
I don't know how to relax. I feel like I have to muscle through to relax.
You can't take the athlete approach. You can't just knuckle down. You have to submit to it.
I think it would be hard for Michelle to get out of her own head in the same way for me before you do something like this. R, seven. Houdini's biggest thing was saying, "My brain is the key that sets me free." As soon as Michelle can work that kind of monologue into her head, I think she'll be great for this.
3:38. 3:38. Yes!
Harry Houdini's breath-hold personal record was three minutes and thirty seconds. As of today, mine is 3:38. However, that is a static hold. That might mean nothing when it comes to my final challenge because I'll need to maximize my active breath hold.
Yeah, watch your head. All right.
An active hold is where you hold your breath while doing an activity, using energy. So naturally, the active breath hold is going to be less time than the static hold.
We're at about a minute thirty.
So in order to improve my active breath hold, Lance started adding hypoxic cardio into my training plan, which is basically doing exercise intervals without breathing.
This is a CO2 tolerance training. It's pretty intense. So good. Better.
So I am going to be practicing holding my breath as long as I can while also navigating all of this.
1:59. My active hold is averaging about two minutes now, but the question is, can I pick four locks upside down in the tank in two minutes?
Oh my God.
Today is our rehearsal day, the day before our final performance, and everybody is here. Get to see if all of the training comes through with all of the elements in place: the props, the tank, being upside down. This is the real deal.
If you're cool with it right now, I'd love to just put you on the lid, hang you, suspend you, travel you over. Then that way you can kind of just feel being over top and just do the breath holds upside down.
What are we doing? You tell me. You're the one that called me. I know.
Feet are all secured. All right, you ready, Michelle? Yes. All right, on you guys.
Start transitioning to purge breaths. Three, two, one, hold.
Sorry, it's killing my ankles. This is so painful. Pretty much my entire body weight is being held by just my ankles, and they're being held by an iron stockade, so that is not comfortable at all.
We might want to consider putting little pieces of foam around you to take more pressure off your ankles once you're in there.
Things are going wrong, and we have twenty-four hours to resolve that.
Start transitioning to purge breaths. Three, two, one, hold.
Michelle, can you hear me? Can you hear me now? If I tell you it's thirty seconds, can you hear me clearly? I'm using the walkie. Can you hear me on the walkie? Is it clear?
All right, get long. Stay long.
Sorry, I just opened my eyes, and the lights were disorienting to me. These are all minor things that, when you're watching, you don't realize as an audience member, but these very small things have such astronomical impact.
So when I'm lowered into the tank, my breath hold begins technically, even though the stunt hasn't begun in full.
Hold. Just getting into the tank is already probably a twenty-second breath hold, and then I only have a minute forty to escape all the other locks, which means I have twenty-five seconds per lock. That's really fast lock picking. It doesn't give any room for error.
Lock is on. You're ready to go. Go, go, go.
One minute. All right.
My heart is just so high.
Get your breath, and we'll talk after.
I am unable to escape the tank. I'm tapping out at 1:30, and I feel an immense sense of impostor syndrome. But I'm not Houdini, and who do I think I am trying this? I have put so much time and energy into training for these past six weeks. I'm not even hitting the benchmarks I could in the pool. To make all of the time, energy, and teamwork worth it, I get one shot tomorrow.
Okay, so it's like a magic show. Magic. Look at this and tell me it's not a magic. Okay, all right, cool. You can have an MC.
What a pleasure. So good to be you in the suit. No. Oh my, this is so legit. You could not pay me any amount of money to do what you're about to do.
I read this whole book in a day, and then I took all these copious notes on everything. But one of my favorite quotes from the book is, "Houdini's willingness to try anything was a function of his insatiable thirst for knowledge of every aspect of show business and his shrewd ability to take unrelated skills and use them to his own advantage." Challenge accepted.
Welcome, one and all, to this most anticipated and freaky-as-heck event. Challenge Accepted presents Houdini's Deadliest Trick. My name is Sam Reich. I am so happy to merely be your host this evening. Before we get started, I am obligated to say the following: Hopefully this all goes well, but in case it doesn't, please stay calm and remain in your seats. Our rescue team and medical professionals are standing by, waiting to intervene if necessary.
Stay warm. You warmed up, physically warm? I'm way warmer. Okay, cool. Just remind yourself that once you lay on that table, this world is your world, right? Everything slows down to your pace, and each intake and exhale is just you releasing everything. Okay, we'll see you out there.
Behind me, Houdini's most infamous creation, the water torture cell: a vertical, waterlogged coffin. Tonight, Michelle Khare has accepted the challenge of escaping from this herself. I, for one, am nervous for her. We're new friends. I would hate for our relationship to end as quickly as it began. These keys are coming with me. Now let's hold for a moment and watch as Michelle prepares.
In rehearsals, Michelle's breath-hold time maxed out at two minutes. Any longer than two minutes on that clock could spell disaster. Prepare yourself for an unparalleled act of bravery and discipline. For those of you watching on YouTube, we must emphasize: do not try this at home.
Being upside down disorients the senses. Blood rushes to the head. Michelle's goal right now is to remain as calm and focused as possible and to slow her heart rate. Any unnecessary movement will only lessen her breath-hold time.
Here you go in five, four, three, two, one, hold.
Michelle is in the water, and our timer has begun. Her first order of business, once she gets the go-ahead, is to extract that bobby pin from her wardrobe.
Doors are locked. Go, go, go.
She's made quick work of that, is now unbending it such as to pick the locks on her cuffs. One is out already. The second one appears to be giving her a bit more trouble.
Oh my God. My God.
She has made quick work of the second one. This chest padlock has given her the most trouble in rehearsals, and it appears to be giving her some trouble now. Escaping.
She's done it. Unbelievable. And now needs to get these chains off the top of her head. One minute and thirty seconds have elapsed. This chain is giving her some real trouble, and it's off.
Michelle only has two locks left: the ones at her feet and the ones securing the tank closed. But we are dangerously close to two minutes. This is beyond what Michelle has done in rehearsal.
Those legs are off, meaning all that's left is for her to secure the top of the lid. Our safety team is standing by if necessary.
Is nice.
If Houdini has taught me anything in the last six weeks, it's how to find the power in packaging the skills that make you you. That anyone, no matter how obscure or random your talents may seem, can find success. Challenge Accepted has often left me feeling like a jack of all trades and the master of none. But now I'm starting to see how that can be oftentimes better than a master of one.
If you want to see more videos of me getting my ass kicked, please consider subscribing so you don't miss some of the insane episodes we've got coming next.
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