YouTuber Michelle Khare’s latest challenge takes her to Antarctica

Helen Li: What is a very specific experience growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana and also as an Indian American?
Michelle Khare: There's not much to do in Shreveport, so a common hangout place was, “Let's go hang out at Walmart.” If you're not from a small town, you have no idea what that phrase means, but if you are, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Looking back as an adult, I have so much appreciation for the polarity and blending of the cultures that I experienced growing up. My mom's side of the family is white Christian, Southern roots back in Arkansas. My dad's side is a family of Indian immigrants who came to America and had to learn English as children and adults as a second language.

There weren't a ton of Asian people, and so the connections that I made with other Asian people in my community were really meaningful to me. As someone who is mixed, this is a well-known or universal experience for anyone who is: you exist in this liminal space between cultures, in the eyes of everyone else, that it's not totally “white,” not totally “Indian.” I'm putting those phrases in quotes because mixed-culture existence is so interesting and beautiful, but certainly growing up as a kid was something difficult to reconcile with.

HL: You’ve worked at Google, Buzzfeed, Dreamworks. How have each of these places you’ve worked at shaped your current style on YouTube?
MK: I'm excited about a future where our worlds of traditional and digital are blending into one. The barrier between is becoming hazier and hazier, and that's exactly how I run our company. Intentionally, half of the crew are from the traditional world: have worked on Super Bowl commercials, big movies and TV shows. The other half of our crew are people like myself or others who came up in the digital space, have worked for digital media companies, and understand the Internet. When you get this group of people in a room, our brainstorms are kind of crazy. We're referencing Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, right next to a TikTok meme that blew up last week. You have to have humility in that inspiration can come from anywhere. To ignore one or the other is to ignore the tapestry of people watching.

HL: With Challenge Accepted, you intentionally keep taking risks. How do you approach that conversation with your family? Your team?
MK: It's easy to look at the channel and say, “Gosh, these are some scary and fear-approaching challenges.” I would actually argue that the risks and bravery I'm fortunate to experience are a fraction of what my parents experienced immigrating to this country. I am very privileged as a first-generation, born in America, to not have known the experience of what it is like to move across the world with a suitcase, learn a new language, and try to fit in in a new culture. I consider them to be the original daredevils in our lineage, and what I'm doing is just a small piece of what they experienced.

That being said, anyone who has parents or who has gone through something like that with such an intimate understanding of risk wants to mitigate that for their kids. There's a difference between recklessness and approaching fear with precision. I'm an extremely planned person, and I get that from my upbringing.

Whenever we take on a challenge, my first objective, before we shoot a frame of anything, is to find the best people in the world to teach me how I can prepare myself to do it. Preparation is a large part of these efforts and these stunts. It’s approaching fear with aptitude, with safety, and with confidence.

HL: You once said in an interview that you like to invest in good life experiences. What makes a good one to invest your time in?
MK: My husband Garrett, who is the chief creative officer of our company, has a little bit of a mantra that the more milestone memories you experience as a person, the longer life feels. I do believe that that is data backed. But what I think is interesting about milestone memories is that those are also core stories to a person's life. As a storyteller myself, I have a mutual interest as an individual and as a storyteller for our team, and for our show to go after as many of these as possible, because they make the best stories. I feel very lucky that this pursuit of fear leads to those types of memories, and I'm very grateful that people watch.

HL: With “The Great World Race,” you updated your fans about each race, whereas you usually finish your challenges first and then post the videos online. How did that affect the process and you emotionally?
MK: Personally, I love surprising audiences with “Bam! You had no idea. This is what I was doing for the past six months.”

But psychologically, we all can relate to the experience of vocalizing a big dream in front of a group of people and seeing their reaction. We have all experienced sharing a dream and receiving a disappointing reaction from those around you. Part of my strategy is not just to surprise the audience. But also psychologically, I like to pursue fear from a place of safety, typically. I keep it all to myself to honestly avoid that. This time, I knew that if I didn't update people as it was happening, I was actually not only robbing myself, but robbing our audience of the opportunity to see something live as it was unfolding.

HL: How do you approach selecting your coaches for Challenge Accepted? How did that happen with “The Great World Race?”
MK: I think that it is about finding people you want to spend time with. They say you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. When I choose a coach, I am choosing a person to take one of those slots. Do they have an ethos that I support? Are they a person I want to emulate? Are they happy? These are people I want to spend time with, in addition to having a really strong resume and record of being able to coach people to a level of excellence.

We were really lucky to collaborate with Red Bull, who connected us with David Kilgore, who is a professional ultrarunner who has won this race before. I also worked with coach Garrett Thomas, who has coached people in the Tour de France and Ironmans. He's an incredible world-class endurance coach. I got to go to the Red Bull athlete Performance Center, which is this top secret Pentagon where athletes basically train to biometrically kick *ss, and it's usually reserved exclusively for Red Bull athletes. And I was really fortunate that they allowed me to go through the testing there.