Michelle Khare Is The Tom Cruise Of YouTube: How Anxiety Became Her Superpower

**Rich Roll** (0:00)
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**Michelle Khare** (1:09)
I'm probably the most fearful daredevil that may exist on earth.

**Rich Roll** (1:14)
YouTube star Michelle Khare, behind one of the most popular shows on YouTube, Challenge Accepted. In every episode, Michelle undertakes some truly absurd challenge that most people watching would never try and do.

**Michelle Khare** (1:27)
I find this fear very fascinating to confront.

**Rich Roll** (1:30)
It's your willingness to walk through that fear that makes it so compelling.

**Michelle Khare** (1:34)
There's a difference between being daring and being reckless.
Being daring is being bold with knowledge. So I would like to attempt to become the first woman to.

**Rich Roll** (1:51)
My palms are sweating right now just thinking about this.
I think the underappreciated aspect of what you do is your mastery over story. It's easy to look at your video in a passing way and say, oh, that's a crazy stunt that this person pulled off. But you have to break the story into its three act structure, and you have to know what the bottom of the second act is going to look like even before you do it, not knowing what's going to happen, but anticipating it enough to know that you can build tension and create these obstacles and intrigue and all the things that would go into a professional fictional narrative screenplay.

**Michelle Khare** (2:35)
I really appreciate you saying that. That is so kind. I mean, it's a reflection of an amazing team effort, of course, but what we like to do is with unscripted and with documentary, you can't script out what's going to happen, but we can create scenarios that will hopefully lead to that roller coaster of emotions. And so that's hand in hand with the green lighting process of, do we have enough stakes throughout the next couple of months of filming this that we feel will naturally fall into the roller coaster of a story? And sometimes along the way, we make adjustments if there's not enough happening. Okay, we need to increase the stakes of the final challenge. We need to change this or even you have to be at the mercy of where the story goes. So things change as you're filming and you have to follow that direction.

**Rich Roll** (3:32)
Among the many challenges that you've accepted for the uninitiated out there, you went on a journey to get your black belt in 90 days. You've gone into the firefighting world. There was an experience of becoming a NASA astronaut, a Secret Service Agent, a Chess Grandmaster, enduring a Navy Seal Hell Week, being a Murder Defense Attorney, passing as a Victoria Secret runway model, submerging yourself in a Houdini torture tank, driving an F1 car. I mean, the sheer diversity of these experiences is extraordinary, like the dexterity with which you're able to kind of drop into these worlds that you have no previous experience in and commit yourself thoroughly to mastering it as best you can in a compressed period of time is in and of itself, like filled with traumatic tension.
But I think another thing that gets missed is this notion that you're called like YouTube's daredevil, but that you're fearless. And that misses the entire point of the show, which is that you are afraid and that's why you're doing it. It's your vulnerability and your willingness to walk through that fear and have that experience that makes it so compelling.

**Michelle Khare** (5:01)
Thank you. Yeah, I'm probably the most fearful, daredevil that may exist on earth. Like, I'm a very anxious person, and that's just my whole life has been something I have been a worrier, if you will. Not a warrior, a worrier, W-O-R-R-I-E-R.