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

Michelle Khare is the Emmy-shortlisted creator behind the YouTube series "Challenge Accepted." We explore the seismic shift underway as the creator economy and Hollywood converge. She recreated one of Tom Cruise's most dangerous stunts, hanging off a C-130 mid-flight. We get into daring versus reckless, fear setting, and walking toward what scares you. Along the way, she reveals the simple test she runs before every insane risk. Michelle has arrived, and she's just getting started. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Audience Survey: Shape the future of the podcast by taking our 2-minute survey👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/survey Prolon: Get 15% OFF sitewide + a $40 bonus gift👉🏼https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll AG1: Get the Welcome Kit + D3 + K2 + Flavor sampler pack FREE ($126 in gifts)👉🏼https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll WHOOP: Join now and get one month free👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.eightsleep.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:09Speaker 01

  I'm probably the most fearful daredevil that may exist on earth.

• 1:14Rich Roll?

  YouTube star Michelle Carre, 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.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I find this year very fascinating to confront.

• 1:30Rich Roll?

  It's your willingness to walk through that fear that makes it so compelling.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51Rich Roll?

  My palms are sweating right now just thinking about this.

• 1:56Rich Roll?

  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, you know, fictional narrative screenplay.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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

• 3:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:32Rich Roll?

  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's Secret runway model, submerging yourself in a Houdini torture tank, driving an F1 car. I mean, the sheer diversity of these experiences is extraordinary.

• 4:15Rich Roll?

  Like the dexterity with which you're able to kind of drop into these worlds that you have no previous experience and, 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 like, 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.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, I'm probably the most fearful daredevil that may exist on earth. Like I, 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-I-E-R. And I think part of that is from this understanding and intimate acknowledgement of the sacrifice my parents made. You know, my dad moved to here from India. He gave up everything to give me

• 5:40Speaker 01

  a chance at a future and, and our family. And so it's something I take very seriously and have always, since I was a kid, you know, this is why doing well in school matters. This is why committing fully to anything I do matters. This is why if I take a risk, there has to be an opportunity on the other side. And this show and this project were kind of the first time I had taken a risk outside of the natural career bounds of life. After just falling into that line of do well in school, go to a college, go to this,

• 6:20Speaker 01

  et cetera. But I appreciate that background because it makes me extremely resource aware of, of everything. I'm not hands off with anything.

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a very interesting, that's another conundrum and an interesting tension because you were raised and ingrained with this sense of safety and security being a priority, given your, your parents', you know, kind of experience and story. But then being this incredible risk taker at the same time. It's like you're taking on extraordinary risk, but you're also de-risking it in a way that is, you know, honoring your upbringing, I guess. And that is unique. Like you would think like, oh, you're just out there taking crazy risks. You're just this insane daredevil. But like, you're thinking through every aspect of this and how this project or value proposition or, you know, welcoming this

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  risk into your life is going to have benefits on the other side of it that are going to play to that need for security and safety.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  I think there's a difference between being daring and being reckless. To me, being daring is being bold with knowledge and acumen and armoring yourself as best as you can for what's moving forward. Recklessness is something I don't identify with. I mean, I think if I'm about to do a challenge and I can't explain to my Indian dad on the phone, all of the ways that I put it together and why I believe it's going to be a success. It's not, it's not something that I've actually researched enough that I have prepared enough for. We talk about something like the Mission Impossible stunt recreation. That's a team

• 8:08Speaker 01

  of engineers, stunt professionals. You know, we had the, the team who rigged cameras to Formula One cars in the Brad Pitt Formula One movie, installing our cameras on the side of this plane. And that's why the journey of getting to that is slow, methodical, precise, because it needs to be earned. Otherwise, I am being reckless and I would prefer to be daring.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  Has Tom Cruise watched this video? Do we know? Do we know? He must have at this point. Or Christopher McQuarrie, at least.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I, I don't have confirmation, actually, that Tom has. I've, I've not heard anything specifically, but I would like to hope that if he did see it, that maybe he would have, maybe he would have enjoyed it.

• 9:01Rich Roll?

  Your video where you meet him at the premiere is interesting. Like he's a, you know,

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  I mean, he's just a, I'm obsessed with this guy, not as much as you are, but like, you know, as a personality, as a character, like his charisma and his like energy levels, you know, everybody who's met the guy, you know, says the same thing about what that experience is like. You had this moment with him where you got to kind of share with him a little bit. And we got to see that experience, but what was that like for you, like in person?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  You know, they say, don't meet your heroes. I don't think that applies to Tom Cruise. I, I think one of the reasons that I look up to him and many of the greats, we talked about the Houdinis, the, uh, the Evel Knievels, David Blains, they occupy a space that is one of one. And I find that really admirable and interesting. When you are with Tom Cruise, it's like you're the only person in the world who exists. The eye contact is so intense. Um, and he truly listens and I just admire that he gives a hundred and 10% to

• 10:13Speaker 01

  every single thing that he commits to, that a yes from him is a thousand percent yes. And I, I think that's why that project was so special to me was a lot of our projects are love letters to the communities and the people that I'm transparently a tourist in. You know, I, I, I go to experience Secret Service Academy for a week and it's very intense and we get to tell their story, but I'm a tourist in their community for that time.

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  But you're translating that foreign world, that experience for an audience. Like,

• 10:49Speaker 01

  If we do it correctly.

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  What would it actually be like if you went through Hell Week, you know, or, or you trained to be an FBI agent?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Right. And, and so ultimately if we, if we do it correctly, it's a educational piece. It's, it's inspirational and it's a love letter to the community who welcomed me in. So that's really what that project was for me is the beginning of my channel actually started because I, you know, I didn't have much to offer at the beginning of my journey to collaborators. But I saw an opportunity to highlight and elevate the stunt community because they never get the spotlight. And so at the beginning of my journey, I was sending DMs to like the, the stunt double from Spider-Man, from Batman, from all of these epic series,

• 11:38Speaker 01

  asking, would you train me for a week? And then can we, can we do a project together? And many of them fortunately said, yes, again, because they don't get the spotlight. So my love has always been for elevating these people behind the scenes who are a part of that superhero identity and caricature. Um, and so really it's a, it's a love letter to Tom Cruise, of course, but very specifically to the stunt community.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  When you began this, did you have any sense that it would mature to this kind of place?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I definitely, at the beginning of making stuff on YouTube, always had a vision of wanting to make a proper show, um, something that would feel like it could be on television. I'm putting television in quotes because the YouTube app is on television.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Um, so even at the beginning of my channel, there were plenty of videos that I made of just me filming myself by myself with a phone. But I also, whenever I could, would try to bring a crew together, see if we could borrow someone's cousin's brother's Ari Alexa and shoot something more elevated because I saw it as an opportunity to develop myself as a storyteller. Now, I think back then for many people, it was let me show what I can do on YouTube to then go somewhere else to do it. But what I found really interesting was finding that Venn diagram overlap of what would perform well online, but also bringing high production

• 13:13Speaker 01

  value to it whenever I could, um, even with very few resources available to me. And while I don't think that was necessary for something to perform well, it was exciting to learn how to command a crew, how to truly produce, how to manage many people on set. Um, and also how to create something bigger. Because ultimately what I was hoping to build was just a resume of what I could do with any resource provided to me.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  Your magnum opus is really this, uh, replication of Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible stunt hanging off the side of a C-130 as it's like taking off and flying around. It's such a compelling, what is it, like 40 minutes long? Uh, you can't turn your eyes away from it at any moment. The storytelling is totally on point. You clearly understand storytelling and the production value is equivalent to a prime time, major network broadcast television show. It's absolutely indistinguishable from something you would see on television, except it's on YouTube. You did it yourself with your husband and this amazing crew that you're, you're always

• 14:31Rich Roll?

  bringing your crew into the conversation around what you're doing. And you're basically operating not just a production company, but a startup. And I listened to your podcast with Tim Ferriss and you very much have this entrepreneur, like startup leader. I know your husband is the CEO, but like this leadership idea, like how do you create an organization that can function at the highest level?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's by necessity. I don't, I don't think I'm a person who, um, like woke up and was like, I can't wait to, to make a startup and then let's go do it. It was more that I saw that there was one path that many people have followed in for decades, which is become an assistant in Hollywood, hope that someone sees your work, hope that someone extends their arm down to you and pulls you up the, the rung of the ladder. And I just knew pretty immediately after having some, a little bit of experience in that world, that I would not succeed in that.

• 15:37Rich Roll?

  Why not?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I don't think I, because I'm too impatient.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I, I.

• 15:44Rich Roll?

  Enough with the mailroom?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Well, no.

• 15:46Rich Roll?

  I mean, you did that though. You, you were at DreamWorks and you were at BuzzFeed. Like you've cut your teeth in, you know, kind of the traditional way initially.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And I think those skillsets are important. I mean, you always know when, my husband Garrett says like, you can always tell when someone hasn't worked in service or been an assistant to someone else and that it impacts your leadership style effectively. And so I think those skills were, were so important. I loved PAing. I, I actually loved assisting, but I knew that I would become a specialist in, in supporting more than actually forcing myself to develop my own creative voice. And I had this thought of if five years from now, I'm actually brought into a pitch room and they say, pitch us your idea and pitch

• 16:36Speaker 01

  us why you should show, run or direct or lead this, I wouldn't have the necessary skillsets. I needed to do it. I needed to direct and fail at that and show, run and fail at that and produce and become the CEO of my own company and fail at that until I figured it out for people to actually take me seriously. Um, so that's how I ended up on YouTube was I just saw this opportunity to, rather than tell people my vision, actually just go out and do it and let the audience decide if it was worth watching.

• 17:12Rich Roll?

  And I think it's easy to, uh, get a little confused if you watch the, the Tom Cruise stunt video, thinking like, it's always been this way, but you've been doing this for seven years. You didn't come out of the gate with that kind of production value and that epic of a scale, like the challenges that you began with have incrementally kind of increased in their like, you know, heat value.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, some of my early videos were, I'm going to go to the coffee shop or this restaurant and order something different on the menu because that is scary to me.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  And slowly over time, I just, you know, had the opportunity and the privilege to grow that Goldilocks zone of comfortability with fear. And with it slowly evolve our production style to add a little bit more pizzazz when we can. But I think it's a trap to think that more resources into a project makes it better. And people might find that surprising when you watch this.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  Have you, have you done a project where it was very expensive and didn't kind of connect in the way that you thought it would? And what, conversely, was there a project that cost almost nothing that had an outsized impact?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I would say that I feel very privileged and lucky at this point. When we're about to greenlight something that's going to be a big investment, it, it has to do one of a few things. It, it either has to have a plan to have a return financially, of course, or be an opportunity that, that allows us into something even more exciting or abundant in the future. So with this Mission Impossible stunt, that's a intense, cash intensive project. But we had a really robust plan going into it, which allowed us the creative freedom to really give it our all and a little bit let go of, of some of the necessary success

• 19:16Speaker 01

  of other things. But on the flip side, one of the cool things about Challenge Accepted is that there are very cheap episodes that have performed really well, and I hold them just as dearly to my heart. I think a good example of this is I worked one day in a 911 dispatch. It was a one day shoot. We flew to Colorado, shot it, flew back basically the same day. And I think at this point, it has over 15 million views. And it's impactful because we often take for granted, especially in America, we can, there's a phone number we can call when we have an emergency, 911. And so this video, this episode explores,

• 20:00Speaker 01

  who is actually on the other end of that line? And what training do they need to effectively deploy resources to a person? So yes, we have these big flashy things. You know, we ran seven marathons on all seven continents last year, too. That's a big flashy thing. But I also love the simple episodes that can have just as much, if, if not more at times, impact.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. If it's a 911 call, it's a phone call, but the stakes are very high. And if you're not skilled enough to guide that person, not so great things could happen.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:37Rich Roll?

  So the pressure is, is exceedingly high, as, as high as it would be in any of your other challenges, although it's a very contained thing to capture on film.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Right. And going into that episode, I thought, is anybody gonna watch this? It's just me on the phone for 10 minutes. And it's, I think, you know, the way that our team pulled it together and shout out to our incredible post-production team who really made it this riveting experience through sound and editing. And I think that's part of what the internet teaches you is a level of humility. You can't get comfortable with, man, I'm only going to be doing these big epic, you know, resource intensive stunts from now on. Actually, no, the, we have to be humble to where any story, any piece of inspiration, any piece of impact can come from.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  How do you make that decision? How do you know when an idea is worthy of exploring? Because you're only making like six videos a year. Like, there's a scarcity to your offering, which enhances the demand, I would imagine, on behalf of advertisers who want to be on board with what you're doing. But that means that you're gonna have to say no to most things. And you're really gonna have to hone in on just a few projects that you're gonna focus all of your time and attention on.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  There are a few things that we look for in greenlighting an episode. The first is, our team has to be excited and passionate about it. That's actually priority number one. And I think that's important because if the team of, you know, 10 or 20 people working on it aren't excited about it, how can we convince millions of people to watch it? So having that diverse inner circle of unique people who watch many different things, but can, you know, somewhat universally agree, this is an interesting story, is one for me. The second is, is this going to be a point of tension and transformation? Then that's just like a basic Snyder's Beats storytelling principle. There has to be a

• 22:39Speaker 01

  change in the character, in this case, me, from the start of the episode to the end. We have to learn something new. I have to change as a person. And if the stakes or the challenge don't require that, then there's actually no reason to do it, because there's no reason to watch someone who remains the same at the beginning and end of a journey. And then the third is, is this a milestone life experience? Because I think those all go hand in hand together. Is this something I would be excited to tell a story at a party? And in fact, we actually socialize a lot of our ideas, which, you know,

• 23:17Rich Roll?

  Your test screenings are like...

• 23:20Speaker 01

  I told Colin and Samir this, and they were like, wait, when you told us that idea at a party, you were social testing an idea with us. But, you know, if, if you go to a party or a kickback with some friends and they say, hey, what are you working on? And you tell them, you can, the first thing I look for is their reaction of, they're like, oh, that's cool. Or, wait, what? Tell me more. Or I have a thousand questions about what you're about to do. And if people have follow-up questions, I know there's something there. So often, a lot of our log lines for episodes are me just seeing other friends and bouncing it off of them to see their genuine reaction, because that's, I think,

• 24:03Speaker 01

  is a really good qualitative metric of whether a story is actually worth telling.

• 24:08Rich Roll?

  I want to take it back to the beginning, to your, to your childhood in Shreveport, because it's very formative in, in, you know, creating the Michelle that's sitting in front of me right now. So talk a little bit about what it was like growing up.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Well, I'm from Shreveport, Louisiana. Shout out Shreveport. And that was such an interesting amalgamative childhood for me, because I came from a mixed ethnicity family in a very, you know, socially divisive community. There were not many Asian people there. And there weren't many resources available. And what I mean by that is, if you wanted to learn about film, or arts, or anything, it was kind of whatever you could

• 25:03Speaker 01

  find on the internet and maybe in a club at school. There wasn't much exposure to anything outside of our community. It was, it was a bubble in many ways. And I have many, the experience that I think many people have, which is not fitting in, not feeling a part of that Southern Cajun culture. But something really cool happened when a tax incentive came to Louisiana for filmmaking. So all of these Los Angeles crews started filming movies and television shows in our backyard. So it became this really interesting

• 25:45Speaker 01

  economic and artistic renaissance for our community where, you know, the local store owner is now an extra in this vampire show on ABC and stuff like that. And it was really exciting for our community. So I got to experience being an extra, being a production assistant, and meeting all of these people from outside of our community, who, who inspired me and opened me to other types of way of life, of, of understanding the technicalities of how a visual story is told on a grand scale. And a lot of that impacted me even now in

• 26:27Speaker 01

  giving me the entrepreneurial spirit to kind of, in many ways, do it myself.

• 26:32Rich Roll?

  Layered on top of that was your dad's obsession with movies. So you, you had sort of a film school indoctrination.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  Growing up because of your dad's fandom.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, my dad learned English on the plane, even traveling from India to the US, watching films, and, and emulating the pronunciation of the words that the actors would use. So escaping in, in movies was, was a big part of his acceptance of American culture. And so we had a printed out list of the AFI Top 100 Movies. And every weekend, we would check off a new movie together. And my dad is not a film expert. So he did, it wasn't like he was teaching me necessarily about it, but just us sitting down together

• 27:27Speaker 01

  and trying to decipher Citizen Kane together was, was an interesting attempt at, I think, even just entrepreneurially interpreting art, in a way, in a very grassroots effort. And because there was nothing else to do in Shreveport, we spent every weekend at the movie theater. So I saw every movie that came out, even like, good movie, bad movie, Oscar movie, B-side, romance, every single movie that came out. I saw it.

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  So that's a ripple in the traditional immigrant story that creates an opening for you to explore this world, instead of just being focused on being a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer. Like, is he thrilled that you're doing this now? Like, you know, or is it still like, you can still go to med school?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Well...

• 28:17Rich Roll?

  You're like, well, I made a video, I did, I went on ER rounds with Dr. Mike.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I did do that. He did enjoy that episode. He really enjoyed that. I think that, at, at the end of the day, something I've come to learn in adulthood is that frustration I had felt, and I think many immigrant first generation kids feel of... Uh, like the doctor, lawyer, engineer of it all. It's really the true root of that is a deep love and desire for stability. Specifically because the people who are telling you to become the doctor, lawyer, engineer are people who intimately understand instability and in a very, very real way, not just financial hardship,

• 29:02Speaker 01

  but socioeconomic tension and how that impacts a family. And so as an adult, it's very easy for me to understand that now. Hard growing up, but again, what it forced me to do is, okay, I'm not just going to quit my job and start a YouTube channel and hope it all works out because I'm ambitious and I'll figure it out. I had a nine-month plan and that's because I grew up in an environment where I was made acutely aware of having a plan A, B, C, D, all the way through Z. So I'm grateful for that because it does make me a better risk taker now.

• 29:47Rich Roll?

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• 32:26Rich Roll?

  You have a huge motor. You're very internally motivated. You were a star student. You went to Dartmouth. You didn't just go to Dartmouth. You also were on the cycling team there. You later went on to compete as a cyclist when you were working for BuzzFeed full-time. You became a professional cyclist. You were doing taekwondo, like you're, you're an athlete, full stop, like at a very high level. So academically ambitious and accomplished, athletically accomplished, you know, at an Ivy League school, the traditional route would have been, okay, what's next? You know, McKinsey or whatever.

• 33:09Rich Roll?

  And you end up with an internship at Google. Tell that story, because I think that's also like a sliding door moment for you.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when you don't, you don't go down the doctor, lawyer, engineer path, it becomes, okay, can you go into tech? And I think I saw it originally as, here's the hip, cool version of a stable path forward. I mean, you just know, if you get a job at a place like that, I think

• 33:37Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be okay.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  You're, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna have 401K.

• 33:41Rich Roll?

  Parents will be happy.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yes, and I saw it as, it was, it was the same summer that the movie The Internship came out with Owen Wilson.

• 33:49Rich Roll?

  Uh, oh, is that, is that the one with, where Robert De Niro is the old guy in the office?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  I'll be honest, I don't remember any of the plot of this movie.

• 33:56Rich Roll?

  Anyway, go ahead.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  But it was a movie about, it was a comedy about being an intern at Google. I don't understand.

• 34:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, yes, I remember that.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  This movie is crazy, actually.

• 34:06Rich Roll?

  It kind of came and went, but I do remember, they were actually at Google.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  They were, I think they shot it there even, which is insane. So it was the same summer that came out and at that time, it was this sense of, this is the cool way to have stability. There's free lunch and there's outings and flexibility. And so I was curious about exploring that. Now, what ended up happening is while I was there, I got to see a little bit of the behind the scenes of YouTube, which was acquired by Google, and learn more about this emerging platform and was so interesting to me. And at the end of the summer, they have this, I don't know if they do this anymore, but

• 34:50Speaker 01

  there's a designated day when, after you've completed the internship, you go back to school and you're waiting by the phone for a phone call to see if you get the job. And I was in a group chat with all of my friends. Everyone's like, I got it, I got it. I'll see you next year. I start July 15th next year, can't wait to see you. I got my phone call. I did not get the job. So I did not get the job and

• 35:20Rich Roll?

  Had you got the job, you would have happily taken that job.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Had I got the job, I would have taken the job for sure, I'm sure. And again, because I think at that point in my life, I was operating from this deep place of, I've got to find security, I've got to find stability to, for myself, for my family, for honoring their sacrifice, like all of those very deep-rooted fears were driving all of my decisions. And that rejection actually forced me to become creative in many ways for the first time in my life, like true creativity of back against the wall. I, you know, I didn't get this job, corporate recruiting already happened, what am I going

• 36:06Speaker 01

  to do? And I appreciate that because it, it led me to working as a creator in YouTube. And I, I think a lot of those inflection points happen when your back is against the wall and you have to step forward through that fear.

• 36:27Rich Roll?

  Your real education in storytelling and production was at BuzzFeed, though. You end up at, is, is that where you ended up, like right after college?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I ended up at, at BuzzFeed, which again, I'm like reconciling my like crazy head, I'm trying to reconcile, all right, so like, this is sort of the intersection of tech and entertainment. Yeah, that'll be safe and secure.

• 36:49Rich Roll?

  Was that peak BuzzFeed time?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  It was, so at the time I was there, not because I was there, but I just happened to be there, when it was at, at one point, the fastest-growing YouTube channel and series of YouTube channels in the world. It was an incredibly cool environment where everyone was in their early twenties. It was a startup vibe, but creative in, in a, in a, in a artistically creative way, I suppose. And I would say that I learned a lot about what works on the internet and how to drive a moment on the internet. But I think a lot of the storytelling that I learned, specifically that we bring to

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Challenge Accepted Now, was meeting the people that I actually collaborate still with to this day, on Challenge Accepted, so like Garrett and Nick on our team. Um, so while I was at BuzzFeed, I was also becoming friends with a group of people who all went to film school and learned everything from the ground up and absorbing just by osmosis from them, all of this fantastic film history and um, you know, we would outside of work, go to the events at the Academy Museum and, and learn about this stuff. So as someone who didn't go to film school, just surrounding myself with people who could say, oh, this

• 38:17Speaker 01

  is why uh, in, in this film, the camera moves like this to emphasize this because in the script of XYZ, like learning that backwards was really helpful for me. And when I left to create my own channel, um, I was really fortunate that they were excited to, you know, spend a Saturday with me collaborating on a, on a video together.

• 38:38Rich Roll?

  And you were thrown into the deep end and you had to, in the chaos of, you know, BuzzFeed, uh, where so much was happening so quickly, had to figure out how to make these videos, how to shoot them, edit them, get them up online, evaluate what's working, what's not working. And then, you know, rinse and repeat time and time again. I mean, that was really your, that was your, you know, kind of Navy SEAL, you know, boot camp, film school experience.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  It really teaches you um, a sense of done is better than perfect and urgency. We were required to deliver a certain number of videos per week, plural videos per week, long form YouTube videos. I mean, this was before short vertical video was a thing. Um, and we were required to ideate, script, shoot, edit, direct, cast, whole nine. But it was always about meeting that quota and hitting that deadline. And sometimes that led to, that pressure led to incredible outcomes. Sometimes a lot of, you know, people experienced

• 39:47Speaker 01

  um, fatigue and burnout from that. But I really appreciated, you know, you get your hundreds of reps in there of learning what works and what doesn't. And ultimately, even though the business model of our channel and, and, and company now is in many ways completely opposite to that because it's scarcity more than anything. Um, it, it comes from a place of moving when something matters. And I never want to let go of that.

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  So given this appreciation for stability that had been instilled in you, what was the journey towards like, releasing yourself from the corporate, you know, kind of womb and like going out on your own? Like, how did you make that leap uh, and reconcile that, that desire, that need, or that appreciation for security to venture into a world where there was very little of it?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  For me, this came down to, um, I, I accidentally stole a copy of The Four Hour Work Week from a coworker, uh, which I still have. I don't know who I stole it from, but I have your book. Hit me up. Um, I, I, I borrowed this from a coworker and I read the book and it was really impactful to me. I mean, you know, when you, when you read some of that, uh, when, when you have your first couple of experiences reading nonfiction literature, I think it, it really opens your mind. Um, and I appreciated how Tim very

• 41:29Speaker 01

  clearly laid out, here is a plan for how you could um, start your own company or uh, create autonomy for yourself. And while I didn't apply necessarily all of the principles, I did a um, a fear setting chart. I um, I made a plan nine months before quitting my job of what to do. And it was very simple. Um, I moved into a studio apartment with a roommate. I cut down a lot of my living expenses. I forced myself to make videos every weekend, even if I didn't post them. I needed to socialize and prove to myself that I actually cared about this thing enough to warrant leaving stability, leaving the

• 42:14Speaker 01

  nest. But at the end of the day, I think again, it came from a, a sense of, I felt that I had plateaued in this position, that I had learned a lot, but I wasn't actually challenging myself and that if I wanted to get to where I ultimately needed to go, the fastest way to get there was to take a big jump.

• 42:41Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. So by lowering your overhead and right, like realizing like, like, okay, I don't need all these, like, I can live like leanly. Um, I can stretch whatever savings I have. Uh, give space for taking a little bit of a leap, taking a risk. Talk a little bit more about the fear setting idea, like whiteboarding out your fears and really kind of confronting what those were at the time.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. I knew that when I left my job, I had a couple months of savings, but I also understood if I get this many views, theoretically, I could make it this much in AdSense and that could cover this, this, and this. So at the beginning, my, my model was um, make the best thing I can to garner a garner um, viewership and really serve the audience. And hopefully I'll see at least like living expenses covered by this thing. Um, some of those key fears I had were running out of money. They were

• 43:56Speaker 01

  uh, the shame component of, you know, I've seen at that point, other people, just in general in my life, leave their jobs for an entrepreneurial venture and completely fail. Um, there, there was fears of um, just, you know, embarrassing yourself online. I think that the, I've heard other people say this, but the barrier to entry of success is a mountain of cringe. And so I think when you're young, there's this feeling of, man, if I'm out here trying and trying publicly where everyone can see me online, if it's,

• 44:39Speaker 01

  if it's not going well and nobody's watching, everyone's going to talk about me behind my back. So like all these, all of these things that like you and I know absolutely don't matter now.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  And, and this notion like, she went to Dartmouth. Like, what is she doing? You know, she, you could be, it almost makes it worse. Uh, I mean, the fact that you have this education means that you probably, even if it didn't work out, you could probably go get a job somewhere. Like you're going to be able to get hired. There's a, there's a built in kind of internal security system to that. But at the same time, there's the internal monologue of like, I went and got this amazing education that, you know, my parents, you know, bled for so that I could have. And now I'm going to go be a YouTuber when I could be doing fill in the blank. You know what I mean?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  I'll be honest, I hadn't thought about it that way. Thank God it worked out.

• 45:32Rich Roll?

  That's where my mind goes.

• 45:37Rich Roll?

  Or like, my classmates, my classmates are doing this and I'm here like trying to build a YouTube channel. Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:46Rich Roll?

  Before, I mean, because this is before like, yeah, it was.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Before it was known that it could be, I think, um, I think back then people knew that there were YouTubers who had found financial success. But I don't know if universally, and even today, I suppose that it was always a respected profession, um, or that it could be a company. I think that there's been a big shift in the past few years, at least of understanding these business models are fully fledged production and IP companies.

• 46:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You're running an entire enterprise. You're running a studio, basically. But that wasn't really the idea, you know, eight years ago necessarily. I mean, not that there weren't examples of that, but it wasn't the way it is now.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. And that's why I think part of the fear setting methodology was helpful to me because I gave myself a deadline. I said, I'm going to give myself three months to really make this work with this game plan. And if it doesn't, my LinkedIn is up to date. I'll call around. I'll make it work. Uh, I don't think I felt like I would be fine, but I was telling myself I had done enough. Um, and then just going in with the knowledge of. These are the three months that are not a gift to me, but these are the three months where I prove

• 47:12Speaker 01

  to myself and to uh and to my future that it's a worth like I can step up to the plate. It's on me to actually find success. And I think taking ownership of it's on me if the video goes up this week. It's on me if it if it does or does not get views. And if it doesn't get views, it's on me to interpret the data and learn from that and grow as a better storyteller. It's on me to make sure that when people collaborate with me, they're paid on time and effectively. Everything, I think that massive responsibility was very heavy and scary to do alone when I didn't really have any other peers who were doing something like this.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  But also it gave me empowerment to know that if this doesn't work out, there's no one to blame except for me. So it's it's on me.

• 48:01Rich Roll?

  The agency is exciting but daunting at the same time.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  So daunting.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. To backtrack a little bit here, I mean, we kind of skipped over the fact that you were a professional cyclist.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Our our overlap.

• 48:14Rich Roll?

  You're working at BuzzFeed and somehow you're competing as a professional cyclist on the BMW team and traveling every weekend to what were you racing, crits?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  I was primarily crits and then I did some stage races and road races too, but primarily crits, criteriums.

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  How were you training during this time and racing? And then when you went out on your own, did you just decide, okay, I'm putting that aside?

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, here's what happened. When I got the job at BuzzFeed, I also found out that I was it was it was a few weeks after I very was very lucky to win U twenty three Nationals that year.

• 48:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Which is crazy. Okay, no, I'm just gonna tell the story because

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Please.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Here's the story.

• 49:04Rich Roll?

  People probably don't ask you about your cycling career. Like, I'm here for that. Like, please.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  All right. So I started cycling when I came to LA my junior year on an internship and I didn't have any friends. So I but I saw everybody here bikes. It's, you know, very outdoorsy place. Um, so I thought, okay, maybe if I join a cycling group and and I'll have friends.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  So I just started doing it.

• 49:32Rich Roll?

  You hadn't even so it wasn't like you had been riding bikes forever before this.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  I wish.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. But it's walk with me. Okay, so I started writing. I just because the weather here is beautiful and I had no social life. My social life was going to ride a bike. So when most people are hanging out chilling at home with their friends, I was like, well, if I want to have a social life, I'm gonna go to the seven PM Griffith ride tonight. And just by doing that, I I naturally improved and I was terrible in the beginning because I had no experience with endurance sports whatsoever, but I just loved it and I got hooked. You can you know exactly what I'm talking about. And it's a great way to see the city when you're new here. So I was getting to see,

• 50:20Speaker 01

  you know, the top of Mount Wilson and all the Santa Monica Mountains and even seeing places that people who have lived there their whole lives never get to see. And so that was just really exciting to me and I and I enjoyed it. And so when I went back after my internship to college, I um I was just like, well, I guess I could join the cycling team and see what happens. And it it went well, but what happened is after I graduated, there was U twenty three Nationals. And there are two events. There's the road race and then the criterium. The road race happens before the criterium. And I don't think I did exceptionally well in the road race by any means.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  But what a lot of people do is they look at the results of the road race to know going into the criterium, who are the real threats to deal with? So something happened during the criterium race where some something just came over me and I realized nobody sees me as a threat. What if I just go off the front?

• 51:31Rich Roll?

  Off the front.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like have a moment. You know, people just do that and they have a moment. I was like, I'm not gonna win this thing, whatever. I'll just have a moment. Maybe I'll get a nice photo because they always have great photographers at these things. So I do that.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  And twenty minutes pass. And I'm like looking at my garment. I'm like looking at the laps. I'm like, what's going on here? And I'm I'm pushing myself. And exactly that happened where because nobody thought I was a threat, they assumed I would burned out burn out. And then I ended up winning the race.

• 52:05Rich Roll?

  That is so crazy.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  I was not the best cyclist.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  And this was your senior your senior year in college?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Just after I I graduated and then like three weeks later when and I just I was just like, oh, yeah, I'll go do that. I um I know somebody who lives in the area. I can stay with them. Um, and I was still like trying to figure out what am I supposed to do with my life? So that happened around the same time that I got the job. Uh, and so without knowing much about either, I was like, well, let me put an egg in each basket and see what what goes the farthest. And what was cool is now both exist in my life in a different way in that I get to be a an athlete for challenge accepted, making the show we make.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And I think that what that period of life taught me where I was like basically Hannah Montana living double life was there is always you could always make time. If you care about something, there's time for it.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  You will make the time for it. Um, and really maximizing every single second you have because I was getting off work at six PM and immediately going on a training ride, waking up the next day, doing it over and over again. And that is I I think, you know, you have to have balance with that, of course. But it it really taught me how to maximize my time and and make time work for you.

• 53:38Rich Roll?

  It also adds a uh an added layer of color on your seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. It's like, okay, you're not coming from nothing on this. Like you, you're a U twenty three national champion.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Well, there was some time between those two things. Let me clarify.

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  You know, but uh, you know, knowing that it's like, oh, she's gonna be fine on these marathons.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  It was really hard.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  I would rather do a criterium than run seven marathons in a row again. Yeah, that that was a big one.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  That was a really big one.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  It was fraught with all these obstacles and challenges. I mean, the Antarctica marathon was insane and you got to do it uh with David Kilgore, who I don't know, I've met him. Um, I don't know him well, but you know, no better person to be your shepherd. I mean, was he? I guess he was your coach. So you talk about needing a coach, a mentor and a cheerleader for every one of your projects.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  That's true. Yes. Yeah. So I I mean, people ask me all the time. What is the, you know, how do you learn something quickly? And I I think it is those three things. It's you've got to have a coach, a mentor and a cheerleader. And those aren't always people. But in the case of our episodes, they typically are. So for the seven marathons challenge, I wanted to have an exceptional coach who has coached people to do great things in endurance sports. So for me, that was Coach Gareth. But then I also think it's important to have a mentor, which is someone who has been in that hot seat before. And those are typically two different people.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  You know, the the person who is coaching the Knicks may not have been in in a supreme basketball player themselves, but they clearly knew how to win this year. And so the mentor figure for me is in this case, David Kilgore, who has not only done the seven marathon experience around the world, but he's won it before. And so the that differentiation is important because you want a coach who knows how to teach. And you want a mentor who can relate and empathize to, I know what it feels like to be shivering in Antarctica, questioning how you're gonna run twenty more miles. That relatability is important, especially when you're going after something big.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  If you're if you're taking a big risk in life in anything, I think there's a sense of aloneness that comes with it because if you're really stepping outside of your comfort zone, you're most people don't in general. So that that's important. And then the third role is the cheerleader, which is the person who just loves you no matter what the outcome is. And I think that's really important because it connects you back to planet Earth in a way of reminding you of the gratitude and also that you will continue to have support moving forward. But at the beginning of my journey, like the coach mentor, et cetera, that was like

• 56:48Speaker 01

  my coach is a YouTube video teaching me how to edit better. My mentor is following someone who has been a YouTuber a year longer than me and just seeing what their trajectory is. So the mentorship is not always person to person, but it can be observing and learning from different entities. And then the cheerleader for me at the beginning of my channel was my sister who

• 57:13Speaker 01

  really was like, go off, do it.

• 57:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Rich Roll?

  You talk so much about your team and you're always crediting them. This is a team effort anytime these challenges are tackled. But to your point, like in the early days, you know, you didn't, you weren't surrounded by, you know, 30 people on a set. That grew over time. So at the beginning, when you would have some audacious idea or some challenge that you wanted to execute, how were you able with limited resources to find the people to build these, you know, teams that, you know, some, I'm sure like are temporary for the production, but then kind of then you have your core, long-term, you know, everyday team. How did you slowly assemble that?

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  Did it come from those friends at BuzzFeed initially and then you built upon that? I'm interested in like the economics of how you slowly, you know, were able to kind of ascend to this place where you're capable of managing like these gigantic productions.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  I learned early on that the concept needs to provide value to the artists and collaborators that you're working with, regardless of how it performs. So

• 58:34Speaker 01

  for me, for those early projects where we would have a crew of 15 or 20 people, pretty quickly out the gate of starting my channel, even if the offering I, even if I couldn't always provide financially in the way that people may have been used to, I was able to find ways to allow them to express their creativity in ways they don't get to do on traditional film sets. And I learned very quickly that there were frustrations that every department has in working in the studio system. And so I thought, okay, well, there are very simple ways I can provide comfort and value that aren't always financial. Here's a very basic example.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  If you work on a big set, there's typically just general catering. Oftentimes people forget dietary restrictions, they forget vegan, they forget all of this. And so I thought, okay, you know, I might not be able to afford the nicest catering, but I can allow everybody to choose exactly the order that they want from Chipotle or whatever, whatever we're ordering. And that small gesture is just an example of many ways I was able to identify what are solvable pain points in your other workplaces that I can fix in mine that, that, that at least bring joy to the creation process. And those are things that we still do today.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Like I think that if you are a producer, bringing your crew together, you're a party planner. You want people to have fun working together. You want to create a space that has joy when you, when you come to it. And if, if it doesn't have that, then I have failed as a producer. So there were, there were minor things like that, or even hearing, you know, hair and makeup teams are often frustrated when they come to set and there are no tables for them. And, and they have nowhere to put their stuff. There's always tables for camera team, but not for hair and makeup. Okay. Well, I've got a folding table in my garage and I'll make sure it's laid out nice and that it's labeled properly. It costs $0 for me, but it actually means something to someone else.

• 1:00:45Rich Roll?

  People feel seen and honored and respected.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And another thing that we started doing pretty early was postmortems on shoots. So again, with, with zero, with not much to offer, what I would tell people is I, you know, I would text people after like, hey, how did you feel on set? What can I improve on? And sometimes that feedback was super actionable. Hey, next time we do this, um, I would, I would like 45 minutes to, to set this light instead of 30. Great. I can do that next time. And that helps me learn as a producer to better support the people coming together. So we do that for every single shoot, for every single upload, we have a department head postmortem.

• 1:01:31Rich Roll?

  And that's portable outside of

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Rich Roll?

  Film production, like if you're on a team or you're leading a team in your workplace, obviously that's like a good idea.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:40Rich Roll?

  It's going to engender loyalty and buy-in and emotional connection to the shared mission.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  And it's something I think that like Kim Scott, for example, emphasizes so well with radical candor is, I think in the beginning, when I, again, was the only entrepreneur in my sphere that I knew who was crazy enough to quit their job and started something. I didn't have any peers to learn from about management, about how to do anything on, on the business side of things. And I think a lot of young people are scared to ask for feedback after a group project like that, because sometimes you know, oh, I messed up and I, or, or, um, I already know what they're going to say.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  And I, I would argue many times you don't, um, or many times you think that if you really messed up in the project, it was unnoticed to other people. And I think like having the bravery to ask for that critical feedback is, is mission critical. Otherwise you find out months, years later down the line, oh, this has been a problem since whatever, and I could have fixed it so easily. It's so mutually beneficial to ask for critical feedback.

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  Giving feedback and receiving feedback is a skill and an art that is teachable and learnable and vital and critical, but something I didn't appreciate until I moved here and started hanging out with more creative people and started working in a more creative capacity. Like I never thought much about that. It was something like, whoa, I don't want to hear, you know, like, I hope it's good, but you don't really value how important it is to be able to be open to constructive criticism. And what you find, and this is probably, you know, at a heightened level in a place like Los Angeles where, you know, everybody's kind of involved in some kind of creative

• 1:03:40Rich Roll?

  project, like, like welcoming it, like being like, oh my God, I can't wait for this feedback because it's going to make me better as opposed to it being like identity threatening, you know, and something to like fear, like understanding it's, when it's, when it's given in the right spirit and strategically, you're able to receive it in the spirit of like, we both want this to be the best thing and we have this shared common vision. And the way we're going to get there is by allowing ourselves to be open and honest, like that radical candor is like vital to the health of a, the best interest of the product, of a project.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  So it's something that is difficult, may, might be difficult now emotionally, egotistically, but always pays dividends in the future.

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

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• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

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• 1:06:03Rich Roll?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. If you are new to the show, there's something you may not know about me, which is that for the last seven years, I have slept outdoors in a tent every night because quality sleep does not come easy to me and temperature regulation is the biggest reason why. And this is something I've solved by two things, the SoCal nights being generally cool year round, and then the Eight Sleep Pod 5, which regulates the temperature under my sheets to maximize deep sleep. Pod 5 is a smart mattress cover that goes right over your existing setup and it cools or heats each side of the bed, anywhere from 55 to 110 degrees and then holds you there all night.

• 1:06:45Rich Roll?

  It also tracks your sleep and recovery automatically and quietly tunes the temperature over time to what actually works for your unique body. And in July, when the nights get warm and everyone quietly starts sleeping worse, that difference is everything. I don't say this lightly, the pod might be my favorite thing that I own and I cannot imagine going back. Use my code richroll at eatsleep.com slash richroll for up to $350 off the pod. You get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it, but I'm pretty confident you will.

• 1:07:24Rich Roll?

  You're approaching this like you're getting your Harvard MBA, like you're studying Adam Grant and like organizational psychology and like how to build this team. And you're thinking deeply about all of these things. You're not just, oh, here's a challenge and I need to make a video about it. Like, there's so much more behind the scenes going on that has contributed to not just your success, but also the longevity and the stability of like what you've built.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I love Adam Grant, one of my favorite people.

• 1:07:58Rich Roll?

  And he's like your pal now.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I would love to say he's my pal. Yeah, I think he's really, really cool. He's like an A-list superstar to me. I just love him so much.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  I think something that I had to learn and unlearn when I started my own endeavor was the concept of slowing down when I saw all of my peers speeding up constantly. And I mean, I'm very grateful for the success we've had. But our trajectory, and you can look at the data, it's been slow and steady growth, where some of my peers have experienced massive J curve. And that's because they went in the camp of this is working, we gotta go, go, go, go, go. But I also saw that at a certain point, they hit a mass where they had no infrastructure.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  They hit burnout. There's like financial troubles. And so every step along the way, I've just honestly been lucky to be surrounded by people who said, actually, wait, let's think twice about that. Let's, let's, uh, let's consider this. This is not just a video. This is going to be online forever. What is that? You know, asking important qualitative questions that led to quantitative success. But you have to sometimes sit with that pain of watching other people really go up the roller coaster while you are marinating in this sense of,

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  I, I hope one day people understand this vision for prestige television on YouTube.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  And that's Was that always from the beginning, the vision, like, I want to create like the highest quality, television-worthy type of content? Because all the incentives in your space were more, faster, crazier. And you are in a genre where, you know, like challenge videos, it's like, okay, well, every, every, every new video has to top the one before. And there's an acceleration to your point of like people burning out and flaming out. Like, we've all seen people who were big once and you're like, what happened to that person? They're gone. And they either like got into a situation where it just got too crazy or they didn't have the organizational infrastructure to be able to handle it.

• 1:10:24Rich Roll?

  But you from the beginning, having the self-belief and the conviction to not play that game and say, we're only going to put out the highest quality stuff and it's going to take time. And we're going to have to, you know, kind of go dark for extended periods of time. While we're really workshopping this stuff and, and be able to have the temerity to withstand, you know, kind of the pressures that are on us to like put stuff out to just say, no, we're going to make this the best and it's going to take time and it'll come out when it's ready to come out. And that's a very traditional Hollywood kind of approach as opposed to a YouTube approach.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Well, something I, I noticed early on was I,

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  at the beginning of the channel, I would do three videos that I thought were just performable. And then one video that I would really sit with and, and, and try to make my best and bring in my friends and make it a little bit of a bigger thing. And I enjoyed the response from those projects more. And I saw the community deepening and really responding to those more in-depth projects. So the, the vision was always, how can we bring the learnings from the high performing stuff in, into these passion projects? And, and hopefully, you know, like have this cross-axis where the stuff that we enjoy making the most is also the stuff that performs the best.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  But you have to be humble to, I think, a little bit of that. Sometimes what the audience wants isn't the big flashy thing. And that's okay. And what can I learn from that? How can it make me a better storyteller? The vision, but I had always noticed that with those deeper, more intensive, higher production value projects, I could at least differentiate myself from everyone else. I saw, you know, everybody's doing these big challenge videos. In many cases, using clickbait or using drama, those aren't values I necessarily align with. How can, how else can I stand out? Okay, well, I'm very fortunate to be surrounded by such talented artists.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  This is how we can stand out is our teamwork here. So it might not always get the most amount of views. But if we do it right, we can create something that does have a high impact on people and a, and a deeper touch point to the heart. Because at the end of the day, what I think a great episode does is helps people emotionally rehearse courage. And if we haven't done that, despite how many views that piece may get, it's not actually a success. We have to help people inspire change. And so that's why the comments and feedback on, on those more in-depth episodes meant more to me. And I saw a larger opportunity for deeper impact.

• 1:13:18Rich Roll?

  You're playing the long game always. You know, you have your eyes on a very distant horizon where so many people in the creator space are, are chasing trends and creating from a place of reactivity. Like what's, what's hot now? We need to do this. And they're bouncing around within, without any kind of firm ballast. And you just seem so grounded in your approach. And there's something beautiful about that. We've lost the appreciation of the artist who disappears for a couple of years. The Quentin Tarantino's, even, you know, Christopher Nolan's and, and, you know, the Rolling Stones, whoever it is, like, they're not like making TikToks every day.

• 1:13:59Rich Roll?

  Like, they're working on mastering their craft and they'll come out with something when it's ready to show you. And when they do, it impacts culture in an exponential way as a result. So within the kind of context of the creator economy where the pressure is, oh, you should be posting more. And you do the ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. It's, it's creatively draining, it's exhausting, and you're not putting out great work. You're just, you're kind of like on this hamster wheel. So of course people are burning out or getting tired of it or losing their enthusiasm for this medium. And you creating fewer pieces of content that are more durable

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  and really thoughtfully conceived and conceptualized and executed on gives them, gives your, gives your projects this longer tail, but also establishes you at a different kind of tier that is starting to look more and more like traditional Hollywood. Like, we're coming full circle in terms of what's happening. You know, it's like, yeah, like, okay. Podcasting was cool because you could just buy a mic and do it anywhere. And then it became a video thing. And then everybody's making their own public access TV show. But now you have to create a network television show in order to be competitive.

• 1:15:24Rich Roll?

  And we're seeing podcasters who have gigantic staffs of people. And they're functioning as if it's the Oprah show. And that's what you need to do in order to be successful. And so it's incumbent upon the creator to decide, like, what kind of game do they want to play? Do you want to be in that world? Is that what you're doing? What are you really about and what's your mission? I'm not saying any of these things are wrong choices. They're just not for everybody. And when you're making those decisions based upon what everyone else is doing, you're not looking at the white space and what people aren't doing yet that suits your integrity and, and like your vision for, and your unique, like what you can uniquely offer into the, into the space.

• 1:16:06Rich Roll?

  And you seem to have like a lot of clarity about that, I guess is what, that's a roundabout way of saying that.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  I mean, if, if I had it my way, we would release far more episodes of Challenge Accepted per year.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  But we have sort of arrived at, at least for now, this happy medium of this is the most number we can put out. While not just maintaining quality as an ambiguous like production value term, but also the stories take a long time to tell. This week, we're culminating filming on a project where I've been training for six months to go to Taekwondo Nationals. That story can only be told by me actually training to go to

• 1:16:49Rich Roll?

  You can only expedite that. You can't compact that into a week, a week-long production schedule, which is what you would have to do if you were doing that project with ABC or Netflix or Amazon.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  And that's important to me because at the end of the day, the viewers want to see a dramatic transformation in me. They want to see commitment. And that is only earned, unfortunately, through a lot of time put into something. So we have to do a balance of longer-term intensive projects amidst projects like the 911 and Dispatch that have just as much impact, but are only filmed in a few days. And I think having that humility to, inspiration can come from anywhere, is so important. Because I don't know necessarily if I at least have the, the luxury of, if I were to fully fall into the disappearing artist of, I'm going to put out one thing per year.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  I think I would in some ways lose touch with what's performing well. And by that, I don't mean like its views, but what audiences are engaging with. I think it's important to exist in this ecosphere that your audience is in. And then on the other hand, I know that if I had continued on the rat race path, I wouldn't have differentiated myself.

• 1:18:06Rich Roll?

  Early in the conversation, you talked a little bit about this idea that, you know, several years ago, somebody might get into YouTube because it would create some visibility for what they're doing that might lead to them getting a television show on a cable channel or a network. Now that's been reversed, it's been flipped upside down. I would imagine there's very little that a Netflix or an Amazon or Hulu could offer you that would make you want to do something with them. It would have to be a unique value proposition

• 1:18:46Rich Roll?

  because you're commanding an audience that's larger than what they have. And so would you do something with a streamer or a broadcast network? And what would they have to be providing you in order for that to be interesting to you now?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  It's such an interesting conversation because we are seeing content creators get huge exclusive deals at Amazon, at Netflix, at some of these big streaming-

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  Like Mr. Beast did his show with Amazon, so they made it worth his while.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  And I think you look at an example like that and see what Jimmy did was one of the most cash intensive, I think the most expensive unscripted reality show that's ever been done. So I think there are always ways to elevate and expand. And I think more than anything, like more than money or opportunity or whatever, I just want this barrier between the two worlds to go down. Because to me, it's been such a silly arbitrary pencil of a line. And that's why the work is important to me. It's, I recognize that when we post

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  an episode and hear feedback that it is, it feels like a prestige television show, that doesn't just impact me and feels nice to hear. It's, I want other people to know that I'm not the only content creator doing this. There are many people who are striving for this level of excellence. Cleo, Abram, Johnny Harris, Brittany Broski, there are many people who have arrived here. And I feel like it's, it's kind of, it's this situation of a stereotyping association with it, rather than actually truly judging the material for the material.

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

  You're not arriving, you have arrived. And the machine can either accept that and embrace it, or they are going the way of the dodo. And the history is pretty clear. I mean, when you look back at what happened to the music industry, when Napster became a thing, and there were record label execs who were still talking about shipping units, when, you know, these MP3s that were only like two megabytes or whatever, were getting shared all over the world. And people like Skrillex were figuring out how to make amazing music on a laptop. And they're still holding on to this idea that it's going to be the way it always has been. And we need to, like, we need to figure out how to combat this tidal

• 1:21:23Rich Roll?

  wave that's coming in our direction. And the people within the music industry who saw the future and embraced what was happening, ended up winning. And, you know, now we're seeing what's happening. It's maybe not so great for artists along the way. Like, we could have a conversation about what the streaming services, Spotify and Apple Music are, you know, how is that, how is that remunerating the musicians themselves? But the fact of the matter is, it happened. And the people who got on board with it early, were able to figure out a way forward. And revenue models always follow. And of course, now

• 1:22:02Rich Roll?

  the digital files are just, you know, two gigabytes instead of two megabytes, but it's the same principle. And the development executives and the studio people who are resisting what's happening, the same thing is going to happen. And the people who are embracing you and Cleo and like, you know, what's happening in this digital space, everything will get sorted out if they're seeing the opportunity in it. And this convergence of the digital creator space with Hollywood is one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen. And I'm so energized and excited about it. Like, now Late Night through Julian is getting ported to YouTube. And what's next? You know, evening news and sports and all of these

• 1:22:45Rich Roll?

  things. The Academy Awards is going to be on YouTube. And when you look at the audience that YouTube as a whole commands, it dwarfs all of these other streamers, but it doesn't necessarily get the respect that, you know, a Netflix does, because it's doing a different thing. But it's such a behemoth, and it's only going to continue to grow. And the way in which it has captured the imagination of young people, I think is fascinating. Like, when you see what happened with Backrooms and Obsession, you know, with Kane Parsons and Currie Barker, like, these guys are superstars that started in YouTube. They come with large followings. They're so young, and they're making their first features at

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  a level that somebody who has been directing films for 20 years would hope to emulate, you know what I mean? And I have a 19-year-old daughter, and like, she's more excited about going to the movies to see these films than anything else. Like, she loves documentaries, but she doesn't necessarily know who Morgan Spurlock is, or even Shane Smith for that part. But she will never miss an Andrew Callahan video. She's watched every Channel 5 video. And I think, like, seeing this generational shift of these young people who are reinventing these mediums, and speaking in the language of their generation, and how that's connecting with young people, all of which was germinated on YouTube, I

• 1:24:14Rich Roll?

  think is just absolutely beautiful and fascinating to watch. And you're very much, you know, part of that story.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  I'm really excited that it's happening. It just feels, it feels really exciting to me because I, you know, you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about the process of making a show in traditional, it's like a dissertation, that's a Wikipedia entry of paragraphs of steps you have to take. And I think about how much great art has been left behind because someone along the way, like, didn't respond to an email. And that massive chain of events that have to happen for success to happen. And I am excited about a future where future storytellers, if they have an amazing idea, and have the willpower to make it come to life, and to garner an audience who's behind it, I'm excited

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  for them to feel that they have a future of, for them, as a part of telling that story.

• 1:25:13Rich Roll?

  I think the coolest part is the hybridization. Like, how can these two worlds work together to create amazing, like, obviously, you know, Backrooms required A24, and, you know, the machinations of the traditional system in order to get it into theaters, etc. Like, that's a best-case scenario. In your case, I could see you, like, tackling some really crazy challenge that you're accepting, but doing it livestreamed on Netflix in the way that Alex Honnold climbed the Taipei 101 Tower, so that it becomes a watercooler moment for the globe. And that's maybe something that you couldn't do on your own. Like, there

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  can be situations in which that makes sense for you. And you can continue to be this independent creator, and dip into this other world when it makes sense, and both parties are benefiting mutually from that.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  I think there's just so much to learn from them. I mean, we are fortunate to get to draw from decades of Hollywood history of how to technically make a piece come to life on video. And I, anytime we get to collaborate in any capacity with, with a production company or a studio, it excites me, because I get to learn. And I think what's exciting is it seems like these parties are excited to learn from us, too.

• 1:26:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And in the meantime, you get to do productions where you can tap into the craft community, and maybe get the guy who's been assisting the famous cinematographer and say, you've been doing this long enough, I'm going to let you shoot this. You know, give it, letting people like, level up in their, in their kind of, you know, ascension of jobs. And giving them the opportunity that maybe it's going to take longer in that, in that other world for them to get.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Right. And that's part of just creating a creative space that provides value to the artists who are contributing to the work.

• 1:27:16Rich Roll?

  So where, where is this going? Like, what is your forecast for, not for you personally, but just looking at the media landscape, like, five years from now, 10 years from now, what does it look like?

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  I think that we're going to continue to see more exclusive deals with creators made with streamers. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see what this first swath of creators come up with in those deals, and how they parlay their audiences into new IP, new shows, and how people respond. And we've seen so far, like, Mark Rober's Crunch Lab show was at the top of Netflix. Jordan and Seelish Matters stuff was at the top. And obviously, Beast Games performed really well, too. And I think when we see these larger creators proving that it works, it opens the door for medium and smaller creators. And I hope that what happens is that-

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Rather than it being YouTube's over here and traditional is over here. And sometimes we throw a stone across the playground to each other. That it's a bit more free flowing. I also hope because of incredible people like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, that we can see people on YouTube as holistic 360 creators. More than just we'll put this person in our show and give them a line because their audience will come and watch it. I think that's actually was a failure of Hollywood. Probably like five to 10 years ago was this influx of we're just going to insert YouTubers into roles on shows and movies. And I don't know if that was fully successful.

• 1:28:54Rich Roll?

  That didn't work out at all.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  It doesn't work because they're seeing the creator as a marketing vehicle instead of a creative contributor to the project. Um, and because we're seeing proof of concept with these bigger creators of their creative is resonating with big streaming audiences too. No surprise because it resonates with millions and millions of people on YouTube. Um, I hope that we can see creators as, uh, great producers, as great directors, as great showrunners, um, for many different types of media.

• 1:29:29Rich Roll?

  Part of the allure for somebody who has a creative ambition with respect to YouTube is you can open it up and you can see people doing something that feels like something you could do. Like, think of Marcus Brownlee's early, earliest videos where it's just, you know, like they're very homegrown. But now with the maturation of the space and the professionalism that we're starting to see and the indistinguishable nature of shows like yours and Cleo Abram from television. Do you think about how that impacts the young person who's thinking about jumping into this world? Like now it seems harder.

• 1:30:12Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like, well, I can't, how am I going to do what Michelle's doing? Like, it just seems as inaccessible as going into a studio and pitching a television show to NBC.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  But what's beautiful, I think about, um, someone like Cleo or Johnny Harris, any of these people we've been talking about is that's if their career says otherwise. Their career was not pitching it in, in, in that system to make it come to life. It was the slow growth from the beginning. Um, and I also think by contrast of channels like Outdoor Boys that have, you know, 19, 20 million views per video, and it is still that very raw, bare bones approach. It, it reminds me of like in the mid 2000s when there was prestige HBO and there's also Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Both have devote devoted and, and committed audiences though, and both exist on television. Um, though the experience is very different.

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What's, what's consistent though, is that you can go back and watch the first stuff. So you can, it's like, your whole career is on, is on tape, you know? Like, like it would be as if, like, this is true no matter what career you're in. Like when you start out, you don't know what you're doing and you're bumbling around and you make mistakes and you figure it out and you, maybe you get fired and you get a different job and you slowly blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, and then you figure out what, what you're good at and you build a life around that. But on YouTube, you can see the whole thing, you know? So if you are intimidated, uh, by like what Michelle's doing, like go back and watch your first videos and you can see that evolution. Right.

• 1:32:00Rich Roll?

  You don't want people to do that, but it might make it easier for somebody to say, oh, it didn't happen overnight. It happened over all of these years and I can see the growth and how she improved with each one. And that's a lesson in and of itself.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  For sure. And it is easy to say now, I will acknowledge that, but I am so grateful for those early days of doing it all myself. Because now, and we talk about this in our team, that the best leaders and department heads have worked every position under them. Because now I know how to speak with an editor or a sound mixer or, um, and, and help make their job easier. Um, and I think like that helps people respect the leaders they're working for.

• 1:32:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the traditional filmmaking system, what's interesting is that, you know, the director who's technically in charge of the creative vision is generally the least experienced person on the set.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Which is crazy.

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  They only get to do it like every so many years and so many directors are first time directors and they surround themselves with all these people who are really good at their jobs, who have been doing this for decades and they're, they just go from set to set to set. And that director has to command the respect of a crew that knows a lot more about what they're trying to do than the guy who's in charge or the woman who's in charge.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we've all experienced having a manager who has never done the job they're asking you to do and the tension that comes with that. So, yeah, I think like, that's what makes like Garrett, for example, in my opinion, a really good director because he's edited, he's done lighting, he's filmed, he still films. I, I think that connection to all parts of the production process, um, ultimately makes you a better creator too.

• 1:34:01Rich Roll?

  What have you learned about consistently and consciously placing yourself outside of your comfort zone to confront your fears? Like, what is the message that you want people to feel and understand about that? What is the value in doing that?

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  The fear never goes away.

• 1:34:20Rich Roll?

  It's like cold plunging. It's always going to be cold.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fear never goes away. Um, but what you can get better at is systematically understanding how to approach it every time. So as we've said at the beginning of the conversation, I'm a pretty anxious person. I, when I'm going off to do one of these challenges, I'm, I'm just as worried as everybody else watching of have we thought of everything? Am I prepared enough? Um, but the thing that I can control is educating myself, preparing myself. And so that is what I have gotten better at for sure is over time consistently approaching fear, just knowing, okay, it's going, preparing myself, it's going to be painful, it's going to be uncomfortable, I'm going to be embarrassed.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  None of that will ever change.

• 1:35:11Rich Roll?

  And what is the call to action to the audience member or the person who has a different relationship with their own fears? Like, why, why walk through this fear? Like, what is somebody going to get out of it? How are they going to be transformed on the other side of, of, of that confrontation? Like, you've done this so many times and you know how it goes and what, what you feel like on the, on the, at the conclusion of one of these experiences?

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  It doesn't always get easier, but the gratification and growth on the other side is just truly unmatched. That if you are truly pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, there's no option but to grow. There really isn't. It's the only way to achieve growth and it is inevitable. Even if you fail in the ultimate goal that you had originally, there will be a learning if you, if you approach it appropriately. And so I just wish more people did it. I wish more people stepped outside of their daily lives and tried something new. I think it makes the world more empathetic. Um, and I think it makes people better.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  And so with Challenge Accepted, I do hope people get to empathetically rehearse bravery. And ultimately the real impact is if they go off in their own life and just change one small thing, um, and try something just a little bit different.

• 1:36:39Rich Roll?

  I would imagine you must have so much self-confidence though, because you've done so many crazy, hard things. Hang off an airplane, running the seven marathons on seven continents and like dropping in and all these like high risk, high stress environments and then kind of seeing yourself through. You must think like, oh, I can, I can do this, I can do that. Yeah, it's a little scary, but like I have this track record of being able to like manage myself.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Well, that Goldilocks zone.

• 1:37:07Rich Roll?

  That you must feel like the agency.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  That Goldilocks zone continues to grow as I try new things. Um, I will be a little bit confident when I finish a challenge and then the next week I'll learn something new and immediately go right back to rock bottom of humility.

• 1:37:22Rich Roll?

  What's the thing that scares you the most? Is there a challenge that you're like, no, that's too scary. I'm not doing that.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  I probably won't be climbing Everest.

• 1:37:31Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  But I'll say that because I'm actually driven more by the story than necessarily the, the fear or the accolade. Um, to me Everest is something, it's a story that's been told. It's been told many, many times. Many people have done it. And I don't at this point in, in my life, know the additive nature of what I would be doing to make it different or interesting. Um, and I think I'm compelled by doing, uh, by creating stories that are additive, even if they're following in the footsteps of what someone else has done. Um, I want to find my own spin to it. Um, also I don't like being cold.

• 1:38:09Rich Roll?

  You don't like being cold. That's the reason to do it though.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  Um, the, uh, the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible, uh, film that you did, uh, ends with a cliffhanger. Um, can you talk about, can you share what that cliffhanger is? Sorry spoilers. And like where we're at with that right now?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Yes. So after completing spoiler alert, the plane hang stunt, um, we had a goal of convincing the Burj Khalifa to let me climb it to homage, um, the other famous stunt from Mission Impossible that Tom Cruise did where he performed some incredible repelling stunts off the side of this building.

• 1:38:58Rich Roll?

  Is that the suction cup one? Or was that, yeah, yeah. Okay. With the suction cups or the glove that like the battery got on the glove? Right.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  So we had, um, we put together this incredible plan. Um, and just for fun, at the end of the episode, we had this cheeky little call to action for our audience. And what I wasn't expecting was, uh, a few days later, I went on the Instagram account for the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. And it was filled with comments from our audience that just said, let her climb. Hundreds of these comments and I'm sitting there like, oh my gosh, this poor social media manager is probably like, who is her? Who's climbing what?

• 1:39:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Um, and we, we may, and we spent quite a while making contacts and moving forward there. As of right now, it's not gonna happen, but.

• 1:39:51Rich Roll?

  So you say you're, you're unreliable narrator.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  But I think that's the spirit of challenge accepted is like, you've got to vocalize something crazy and put yourself out there. And technically as of right now, it was a failed attempt, you know, it, it, it did not go through. But I, I love just manifesting wild things out into the air.

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  This is also your sweet spot. Like, how do you overcome the no?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. Well, the tallest building in the world, uh, it's not gonna happen right now. But what else can we come up with that's equally exciting? And the, the win and the exciting part was just seeing how many people were thrilled to, to potentially see it happen.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  I know that at one point, they said no, because they didn't think that you like were influential enough or something like, you didn't have a, a large enough.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Well, they've only let.

• 1:40:46Rich Roll?

  A large enough audience, but is this latest no a different no? Like no, or it's not safer.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  No, that's true. They've only let a handful of very influential people, um, stand atop the birch Khalifa, which was part of our request. And to that I say, bet, please subscribe to the channel. So we.

• 1:41:05Rich Roll?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, that was also like the same spirit of us vocalizing, we're gonna go for an Emmy. That sounds crazy for an independent YouTube channel who's not a studio show to try and do. And I, you know, at the time of this recording, we don't know what the results will be, but I, I think being brave enough to say it out loud is step one to confronting the fear and the obstacle of what's to come. Um, and that's something I struggled with a lot.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Before all of this, and now it's, it's if you say it out loud, sometimes you're surprised with how many people come to that calling and are, I say, I want to help. I want to support. Let me see who I know in Dubai. Let, let me, let me see what's possible. Um, and that journey is, is really exciting.

• 1:41:57Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's the story, right?

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  That's the story.

• 1:42:00Rich Roll?

  Part of the story. It's like, okay, we got a no. Like, all right, where, where do we go from here? Like that's drama and obstacle.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  As an audience, oh, we don't want to get that. Yes.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  See how excited you are about the no?

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  I'm so excited.

• 1:42:11Rich Roll?

  The other challenge that I've heard you talk about, uh, that I want an update on is, is tightrope walking the Grand Canyon?

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a newer one.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  Um, this is a newer one. And again, a great example of sounds crazy as a stunt, but the reason why it's compelling and interesting to me specifically is, so I would like to attempt to become the first woman to tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  I find this fear very fascinating to confront because unlike the plane stunt, which is you have to have bravery and you have to train and strap yourself to it and, and get through the flight. But this is a challenge where it's truly a manifestation of the metaphor of taking a step forward every single time towards the fear. It's a, it's the most clear physical manifestation of willing your body to step forward through that. Um, and so I think it's a very interesting exploration of that type of bravery.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  But yeah, we have, uh, begun, we've contacted the canyon. Um, we've begun permitting. Can I tell you something crazy about filming at the Grand Canyon?

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  We learned that to film in the Grand Canyon, you have to do a biological assessment of the land for endangered species because there is one species of endangered cactus that flowers, I think, once a year.

• 1:43:46Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  And they have to make sure that the place we are anchoring the tightrope to doesn't have this cactus next to it.

• 1:43:52Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  So these are the conversations that, uh, that we're in right now.

• 1:43:57Rich Roll?

  My palms are sweating right now, by the way, just thinking about this.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  It's so fun because, uh, I did an episode a couple of years ago where I joined a traveling circus. So for this episode, we actually went back to the traveling circus and I met with the ringmaster to tell him about this idea and hear his reaction and, um, his, his palms started sweating too.

• 1:44:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, this is, that's crazy talking. I'm thinking, I'm also, that reminds me of Evel Knievel, but it also reminds me of that amazing documentary of the guy, who, what was the guy's name who tightrope walked between the Twin Towers in New York?

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, Man on Wire.

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Man on Wire.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Incredible documentary. I mean, that I think that image of, um, uh, of that walk, which is on the poster, that is like our thesis image for this project.

• 1:44:50Rich Roll?

  It's got the long, the, the long, the bar, the pole that he's carrying. Yeah.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  So we're very early on on that project. Um, again, something that might not happen, but we have said pretty crazy things and then they happen. It just takes time.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So on some level you are playing like, okay, it's getting crazier. It's getting cra- you know, like these are, you're notching up the risk level.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  But then next week I am filming a video where in one day I'm gonna attempt to, in a flight simulator, land a seven thirty seven without training. Now that's a fascinating project.

• 1:45:21Rich Roll?

  Fielder gonna be there coaching you?

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  I wish. I love Nathan Fielder. I wish. Um, but I, I, that project's interesting to me because uh, I think, you know, a vast majority of people believe, um, according to some study that they could land a plane if called upon to do so, um, on a commercial airline. So I'm gonna find out if I could land this plane. And that's a one day.

• 1:45:47Rich Roll?

  Training in advance of that?

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  I'm just going in totally blind.

• 1:45:49Rich Roll?

  Right into the sim and be like, I don't know what these buttons are, but I'm gonna land this giant plane.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  I will, it, it'll be a situation as if, uh, everyone is incapacitated on the plane, except for you.

• 1:46:00Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  And I have to go in, put a headset on and communicate with air traffic control.

• 1:46:05Rich Roll?

  And they'll, they're gonna talk you through it.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Yes. Which is a scenario of air traffic, apparently.

• 1:46:10Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, this is a very real scenario that could happen.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  It could happen. Um, but yeah, that's a very safe, contained, we're gonna be in a simulator, shooting it in a day. And it could have just as much impact as any of these other things. So different things impact different people. And I love being pleasantly surprised with the nine one one dispatch episode. Who's gonna watch me talk on the phone for 10 minutes? 15 million people cared about it and it mattered in a way that even I, as someone who was so intimately involved with the project, couldn't have foreseen. So I always welcome that. I, you know?

• 1:46:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  You never know what people connect with.

• 1:46:51Rich Roll?

  Well, you're a Red Bull athlete now, so there's nothing that you can't do, Michelle.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 1:46:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 1:46:58Rich Roll?

  Like you're an official Red Bull athlete.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a Red Bull creator and there's a difference between the two.

• 1:47:03Rich Roll?

  Well.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  But, uh, I think the Red Bull athletes are very cool.

• 1:47:07Rich Roll?

  Do you have, did they give you the Red Bull like bicycle helmet and like all this stuff?

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  I did not. I, those are reserved for athletes only.

• 1:47:14Rich Roll?

  Oh, come on. They can get, they can cough one of those up for you.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  I, I, I, uh, you know, I'm, I'm just really grateful because I think 10 years ago I applied to be a Red Bull athlete when I was a cyclist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was a cyclist. I found some obscure email address on the website and I sent in this application I put together. I actually like dug it up, um, last year when we, when we made the announcement about me being a creator. Cause I, I was like, I, I, I need to find this. Yeah. I applied promptly, promptly rejected. Um, and I'm, again, another good example of, I think if I had just gone down

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  only the athlete path, I would have missed out on this whole beautiful thing of, of, of, uh, experiencing many ways of athletically living life. And so I love getting to be a Red Bull creator. I mean, it's so cool. It's, it's, um, I mean, it's just a, a dream to get to collaborate with them, especially because I, he was my dream sponsor 10 years ago.

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of cycling and Tom Cruise, not that we were.

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  Welding these together. Do you know who Kate Courtney is? Or do you follow cycling at all?

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  I love Kate Courtney. I love Kate Courtney.

• 1:48:28Rich Roll?

  So, did you see what she?

• 1:48:31Rich Roll?

  She just won national championships, like only six months after deciding like, maybe I'll try riding a bike on the road and not on trails.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  And just like crush that race. It's insane.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  I was following the whole time. I was so excited for her.

• 1:48:45Rich Roll?

  But she had a Tom Cruise experience also.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:48Rich Roll?

  Did you know that?

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  When they filmed for the Olympics commercial.

• 1:48:49Rich Roll?

  Where he parachuted on, you know, like, or when he, like the Hollywood sign, like where he landed there and like he passed the baton on to her when she was riding by on her bike.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  So cool.

• 1:48:59Rich Roll?

  So that just tells me that the universe is saying that you and Kate need to figure out something to do together.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Oh, we do. We, we had lunch together a couple of months ago before she went to do Cape Epic. I, I just think she's the coolest.

• 1:49:13Rich Roll?

  She's the bomb.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. She, um, I mean, talk about someone with laser precision on their goal.

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  She could do whatever she decides to do. She could be running anthropic or, you know, like, I mean, she's one of the most capable people. It's, and she's really extraordinary.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  But you, there's a shared DNA here. I'm not surprised you had lunch with her.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  I love her.

• 1:49:37Rich Roll?

  What is your counsel to the young, creative person who's dreaming of a career like yours or just expressing themselves creatively? Where does that person begin? How should they think about their relationship to craft and, you know, setting aside like the business aspects of it? Just like the pure creative expression part of the job.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  For the pure creative expression part of the job, I think it's about studying what has come before. Something that's cool about brainstormers for challenge accepted is, you know, people who come to a brainstorm and reference Apple TV's Widows Bay, Survivor 50, and a meme on TikTok last week, like that, that could all be in the same conversation because inspiration comes from everywhere. And so I think it's important to understand the history of visual medium. And just by watching it, doesn't mean going to film school necessarily, and then participating in it. We're so lucky to live in an era where the only barrier to entry is the upload button.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  There's kind of no excuse to making something. And where I see a lot of young creatives getting hung up is they get stuck on the, the full plan. Here's the series. Here's the, the, the full plan for 20 episodes. I'm like, no, just, just make one, see what that, if that works, because you'll probably change it 30 times before episode two. And I think people can get caught in this perfectionism, which is really just a paralysis, uh, uh, allowing anything to happen. Like you have to be willing to put something up there, take the data from it and move on.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  And I find among our peers that the people who are just willing to, uh, really say done is better than perfect sometimes, arrive at that format much faster than people who try to crack the format in the show from nothing.

• 1:51:41Rich Roll?

  Who inspires you? What were your inspirations when you were starting and, and who inspires you now?

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  The people that inspired me, I think in the beginning were Mindy Kaling, because I saw her as someone who also went to Dartmouth. I mean, she is such a titan of, of female Indian creative voice, really making impact intergenerationally. And with challenge accepted, a lot of the people I look up to are people like Jeff Probst.

• 1:52:12Rich Roll?

  He's your guy.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  I could write a college dissertation on Jeff Probst and how in hosting.

• 1:52:20Rich Roll?

  How many years has he been doing it?

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Since 2026. So 26 years. So I, I think what he has done, um, helming a project for that length of time without distraction.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  And really inventing and reinventing constantly is so admirable, in addition to the fact that he's just a phenomenal host. I mean, you watch him manage a tribal council and the way he is able to maintain neutrality while also progressing the plot. Because that's the role of a host on a show like that is to progress the plot for the audience. And I think, you know, someone might say, why, why does, why is a host needed for a show like that? And I, I think it's because when you watch the contestants at the island in reality, you see who they are behind closed doors and whispering to each other.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  But what you see at tribal council, masterfully conducted by Jeff, is who are the contestants in front of an audience? And the dichotomy of those two things actually tells you a two-part holistic story to the contestants' journey. I'm obsessed with this stuff. So, um.

• 1:53:34Rich Roll?

  So Mindy Kaling, Jeff Probst.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  David Blaine, I think is, I'm not a magician, but, um, I think his ability to hold presence. And as we were discussing earlier, go into hiding and then emerge with something truly fantastic is really admirable. And I mean, just as an endurance performer, what he has done is really one of one. So I love people who have crafted their own nucleus of one of one.

• 1:54:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There's the fear that you confront in the challenge that ends up on screen. But there's also the fear that you're walking through with respect to how you're assembling the pieces behind the scenes in order to even be able to do the challenge. And you talked a lot about this with Tim Ferriss, like, how do you, like, when you're trying to, like, execute some idea that involves getting the FBI on board? Like, there's the fear of like, who do I contact? And like, how am I going to talk to these people and convince them to get on board?

• 1:54:47Rich Roll?

  And I think you put on like a masterclass on like how to craft the cold email and how to like sort of talk to people and get them excited about your idea in the same way that you are. So people should all go listen to that or, or watch that, um, because I don't think we should replicate that. But I do want you to talk a little bit about that part of the fear, like the fear that you have to confront in order to confront the, the bigger fear that is the on-screen fear.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  I'll tell you an example from this week. We are working on a project where if successful, we are going to fly a house with helium balloons. As we have seen in one of our favorite Pixar films.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  We're going to do that in real life.

• 1:55:33Rich Roll?

  Like a real house?

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Rich Roll?

  With balloons?

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  It will, like, it, it will be a, a structure that looks like a house. Yes, yes. Flown exclusively with helium balloons. So no jet propulsion, no hot air.

• 1:55:49Rich Roll?

  From where to where?

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  We're still working out those details, but when you do something like that, we're in a room, we're like, all right, who do we, who do we need to call first? Can we find a helium balloon expert? Oh, there's someone who exists who specializes in that. Oh, we should call the FAA because we're going to be flying, we, we need the, we need a special license. I think it's, what is it called? I'm going to forget.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh. It's called an experimental aircraft license. And we had, we had to get it for the Tom Cruise project where it just means you're putting something weird in the sky.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  And I think like, there's a beautiful part of that brainstorming where you hear a project like that, you might assume, even watching a big TV show do that, that someone just manifests and figures it out because it's a big studio doing it. And what I've learned, meeting a lot of producers who work on big studio things, it's the same process of you sit in a room and go through your Rolodex and think about, who do I know who knows somebody? And so.

• 1:56:53Rich Roll?

  There's one person who's got to figure out who you're going to call.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think you have to have, uh, like, accept the grassroots part of it. I'm sure you've seen this too, Rich, like a lot of great business opportunities happen when you just text somebody that you know. It's not this big manufactured thing of this team coming to this conference room to meet people. It's real, warm relationships and asking genuine questions. So, uh, like when I cold called the FBI, I just think like, most people are too afraid to even pick up the phone and, and use their voice to try.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  And a lot of those cold calls and cold emails are often unanswered, but they lead us in the right direction of where to go next.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  So what I, I would say to, to the next generation of storytellers is there's never really, in my opinion, going to be a point when it's like, when I get to this level, all of these other things are handled for me. I think when you are leading a project, when you're leading a company, when you're leading a team, there's always going to be something that you have to put your boots on and, and do it. And accept that that's part of the process and don't have an ego about it.

• 1:58:13Rich Roll?

  Is there an ultimate bucket list challenge?

• 1:58:19Rich Roll?

  That maybe exceeds your capacity to execute right now, but one day you hope to be able to do that you're willing to share, or would that be, even if you have one, is that something you would want to keep quiet?

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Something I've been thinking about more and that I can improve on is diversifying the ways that we can impact people. Something I've been excited about lately is actually helping other companies and other people with the projects they're on and bringing the things that I know over there.

• 1:58:52Rich Roll?

  I think that's the next step, and that's the white space, because your videos leave all of us inspired and with a hopefulness and an elevated sense of our own possibility. But then where do we, where do we, how do we channel that? And you're like an operations person, you're a systems person, like, how do you take that energy and put it into some kind of template or program? Where people are given the tools to actually access and, and, and begin to like, practice that.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  What should I do, Rich? What would you do if you were me?

• 1:59:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think, well, listen, first of all, like Kate Courtney, you can do whatever you want and you will be successful. So you don't need to ask me.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go into business with Kate.

• 1:59:38Rich Roll?

  You know better than, than I do. But I would imagine that, you know, the corporate world would love to hear how they can train their workforces to be better teams, because you have such a good sense of the importance of team building and leadership, and also the relationship with fear and how that plays out in the workforce. And with the average person, how do we change our relationship with fear? So that we can have a healthier relationship with our own growth and evolution and transformation. So it's that fear piece of walking people up to the ledge of confronting their own fears. Because this is what you're consistently practicing and modeling for the world.

• 2:00:21Rich Roll?

  And then we're like, okay, I should do that, but like, how?

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  A few people have asked me about writing a book, but it scares me. I don't think I can sit with my thoughts for that long, Rich. I think I would go insane.

• 2:00:33Rich Roll?

  First of all, I don't have to tell you that that means that this is a challenge you should accept.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 2:00:39Rich Roll?

  I don't know if it'll make for a good video. Probably be a really boring video, like, I'm afraid of writing a book and now I'm gonna sit in a chair.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Worth it in the year, in this year?

• 2:00:48Rich Roll?

  I think it depends. I think that for someone in your, with your stature and your kind of lot in life right now, it would be very easy for you to get a book deal and then sort of pawn it off on a, on a ghostwriter and have them churn out some book that probably will hit the New York Times bestseller, but might not be a great book and might not really reflect what you're capable of sharing. At the same time, I think that you probably have an amazing book in you, but it's a book that you're gonna have to write, you know, and you're not gonna be able to just like, give it to somebody else and have them do the work for you.

• 2:01:29Rich Roll?

  But if you decide that that is something that is worthy of your investment of time, and it's not easy and it's painful and long and all that kind of stuff. I think that there's something not only amazing that could come from that, but also durable. Like, I do think that even in this age of, you know, advancing AI, that there is something special about books in terms of their lasting capacity to impact people. I still, like, every day get messages about Finding Ultra, which I wrote like 14 years ago.

• 2:02:07Rich Roll?

  So it would be unusual to get daily feedback on a video you made 14 years ago.

• 2:02:17Rich Roll?

  You know, maybe if you made a movie or a television show, but there is something about books, just the physical media aspect of it alone, that withstand the test of time in our kind of recycled world of content churn, where everything you're looking at was uploaded the day before.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  Sometimes I don't know what additive I could bring to the space. Obviously, the experiences I've had are unique, but some of the tactics, I mean, I, I learned from Tim Ferriss, from Adam Grant, from Kim, all of these incredible other organizational thought leaders.

• 2:02:59Rich Roll?

  Sure, and Adam Grant learned from XYZ and Tim learned from XYZ.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Well, Adam has a research lab and he figures it out all himself with his subjects.

• 2:03:08Rich Roll?

  These are, these are convenient excuses to not have to confront this fear, Michelle.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  I don't want to.

• 2:03:14Rich Roll?

  But I will say, maybe it's not the time yet.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  I feel, I think what I mean is I, I feel like I'm still a student.

• 2:03:21Rich Roll?

  There will become a time, yeah, maybe, maybe, I think you could, if you wanted to write a book right now, you could write an excellent book, it would come out, it would do amazing. I think people wanna, like, go behind the curtain. They don't necess, I wouldn't write a book about just here's all the crazy stuff I did. It would be more like, what are the videos not showing? And what are the lessons that you've learned that don't lend themselves to showing up in a video, but are, have some kind of valence that would be helpful to somebody who is struggling in their life?

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:03:56Rich Roll?

  And maybe you just need to, you know, bake that cake a little bit longer. But there is something there, and I would encourage you at the, at the, at the time that's right for you to explore that.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  I, I think I have a pretty good sense on what would make a great episode of TV or YouTube video or short form piece. What for you is that gut instinct of that's a good idea for a book? How do you know?

• 2:04:24Rich Roll?

  When I can't stop thinking about it. But I didn't think I was gonna write another book. I was pretty convinced I wasn't until finally I kind of landed on something I wasn't expecting to, that became like unshakable. But I haven't written a book for 14 years for a reason.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  Why?

• 2:04:42Rich Roll?

  Because nothing, nothing inspired me enough to, you know, basically, you know, tolerate the blood, sweat and tears that it takes, like, it's super hard.

• 2:04:56Rich Roll?

  So you have to really, you have to want it, and it has to be an idea that you feel deeply, that you deeply need to share, because otherwise you're gonna end up going through the motions.

• 2:05:10Rich Roll?

  But I think that, I think that there, there's hidden gifts for you there.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  Thank you for the wisdom.

• 2:05:16Rich Roll?

  And I'm not saying you need to do it now, again, like, when, when the time is right for you and when you feel like you have an idea that you're ready to express.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:27Rich Roll?

  And you'll know when that time comes. Just like you know when this is the next video that I'm gonna make.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  That is so wise. Thank you.

• 2:05:38Rich Roll?

  I'm glad that I was able to help you. I don't know if I did, you're the one who's inspiring me right now. You're leading the charge. It was an absolute delight to have you here and I just, I wish you the best and I can't wait to see your next video and to see what you're gonna do. You're just bubbling with enthusiasm and motivation and inspiration, and you're having a real impact on the world, and I salute you, Michelle, and appreciate you spending time with me today.

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for inspiring me so much, Rich, and for inviting me into your world. It's crazy to see what's on the other side of this black void, by the way. I just assumed it was a 360 black void. There's other stuff over there, guys.

• 2:06:15Rich Roll?

  There's people, there's people over there, too. Soon we'll be exploring this. And maybe next time, we'll be able to have lunch together and Oprah won't be invited to that lunch.

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  I would love to have lunch with you.

• 2:06:33Rich Roll?

  Okay, great, let's do that. Thanks, Michelle.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Thank you.