Mark Rober's Odyssey: From NASA to YouTube Fame

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

0:48I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today's remarkable guest is Mark Rober. If you don't recognize the name, ask your kids. They will know who he is. Basically, Mark Rober makes science entertaining through his wondrous gadgets and viral experiments. After earning elite engineering degrees and a nine-year NASA career working on the Mars Curiosity rover, Mark went to Apple and worked in its secretive special projects group. But that's not what most people know about Mark Rober. Mark Rober is the guy who started with a viral Halloween costume illusion that looked like you were looking through his flesh.

1:45Well, he's come a long way from that. And now, if you watch YouTube's videos of Squirrel Olympics or his glitter and fart bombs, that's Mark. Oh my God, my kids love him. Mark has this build-it-yourself philosophy that embodies the spirit of innovation and intellectual curiosity. He has tens of millions of followers on YouTube. He also rallies the troops to support causes like treating autism and taking care of the ocean. He has unrelenting curiosity and humor. And this was a really special episode because it was recorded in person at his secret studio in Silicon Valley. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People.

2:45And now, here is the one and only Remarkable Mark Rober.

2:56you're cutting onions at home in your kitchen yeah you wearing goggles now or have you found something if you want the truth we're just getting right to the truth i door dash everything now okay yeah so much for that it's still a good story though yeah so the story we're talking about is that when he was a kid he created these goggles i was raised in a household like everybody did chores and we all worked together including preparing dinner and stuff so I think I was like six years old and my mom asked me to make the salad and cut the onions and I do remember this and I was like wait I'm crying I should protect my eyes so I went upstairs under our sink and I got the swim goggles and I came down and put them on not trying to make a big deal out of it and my mom saw that and now this is like a common life hack but this was before then and I was a freaking six year old and i just remember her making a big deal about that and it made me feel good oh like if i have an idea it's rewarded to have a good idea and to pursue it and so much so that she took a picture of it and back then pictures mattered you know you only had 24 on a roll so you were pretty judicious and so we still have that picture in the family of me yeah cutting onions i think if you google mark rover cutting onions it's like online somewhere yeah we're gonna look for that picture Okay.

4:14Speaking of your parents, what do you tell your parents you do now? Yeah, it is funny because growing up, I worked at NASA for a decade and then Apple for five years as a mechanical engineer. So it's like I did do the serious route at least. I gave it a go. And now I feel like I'm taking the best parts of the serious route and what I learned there, building the world's largest Nerf gun or building a glitter bomb. There's a lot of principles there that are the same as putting a rover on Mars. You prototype, you test, there's a design phase, you iterate. So like a lot of the skills I learned in real life work for what I do today on YouTube.

4:54But yeah, luckily YouTube is enough of a thing now that they have something to say. But it was funny growing up because my dad, three or four times I remember sitting down and just like, Mark, because I did pranks a lot, right? Which probably shouldn't come as a surprise to you. As a kid, I just was not serious. He's like, Mark, someday you're going to have to get serious. You can't just skate through life. And now I'm like, what's up, Dad? Look at me. I'm like fart spraying glitter on YouTube. I'm building obstacle courses for squirrels in my backyard, Dad. You're having wiffle ball drones. Yeah, wiffle ball drones.

5:33Yeah. Basically, any sport, you know, automatic bullseye dartboards, anything humans aren't good at. that they wish they were better at. I'm like, all right, what's the robot that could do that better? That's why we brought the surfboard. We have the surfboard question. Okay. Okay. First major area is NASA and JPL. So first of all, how does it feel to send a machine seven months away, 300 million miles away, and there's no mechanic? Yeah, that's such a good question because when you look at space, a lot of times it's more expensive. and that's because it's different than making a car because with a car you have mechanics and it doesn't have to be so reliable out to the 12th decimal place because you could just bring it into the shop or have a recall or there's warranties for this purpose but with space none of those are options it just has to work so sometimes when a bolt has a length that's one inch it's like 1.000 inches like it needs to be that length because so you know if an arm's coming by it doesn't like the precision can matter because it has to work and so therefore that bolt is a 45 dollar bolt so yeah it's a little bit terrifying to send something to mars and your job is done right there's literally nothing you can do from a hardware perspective on top of that the other thing that's scary about sending to mars too is it takes 30 minutes to get the signal from Mars to Earth.

7:00And it takes only seven minutes to go from the upper atmosphere, the start of entry descent landing, 25 ,000 miles per hour, down to three miles per hour on the ground. And so that means by the time we've even got a signal and we're trying to get to Mars, that we've hit the upper atmosphere. In reality, for 23 minutes, it's either been successfully clean and landed, looking awesome on the surface and everything worked, or it's a smoldering heap. And you just have to sit and wait. So it all has to be autonomous and think on its own, especially for that entry, descent and landing. So it's this weird situation where you, at the end of the day, it is a dice roll, but you just do everything you can as an engineer and scientists stack the dice in your favor, which I think is a great metaphor for life.

7:50So if there was ever an application for artificial intelligence that's it right it's in the rover and if you can't do anything for 23 minutes at least if there's ai there it's like a more simplified because it's more like a decision tree if it feels this hot then do this if you know you're going too fast then do this i think currently for just the intro descent landing it's like a very brute force version of ai in a sense what was the hardest mechanical system to make on the rover it's interesting because it's like when people ask me these questions about the rover it's like nobody really knows what the rover is because i know my hardware that i've built better than anyone else does because i was in the weeds with it for five years and so does the engineer next to me because that's how they divide up the rover into chunks and everyone's responsible for a portion but then the guy who has the overall view of everything he or she knows all the parts of the road but they don't know it individually right So it's like this weird emergence thing where we're all little ants and the colony does this amazing thing.

8:54But no single ant knows all the things. From my perspective, what I do know about the high level, one of the things that makes Mars so challenging is the temperature fluctuations. It's not something we really have to deal with as extremely here on Earth because there's less of an atmosphere. And so when the sun's shining, it's really, really hot. When the sun's not, it's very, very cold. It's like being in a desert on Earth, but to a much more extreme. Like Burning Man without the rain. Yeah, exactly. And metal grows, everything grows and shrinks depending on the temperature. And when the variations more, it grows and shrinks more.

9:29So that creates a lot of problems. Not to mention, I know we had a lot of problems with the actuators. So the motors that move everything, and there's a bunch of them. With lubrication, with those temperature environments. I think my answer to that would be like the actuators we really struggle with. And I think it was the actuators that actually pushed the original mission back two years, because that's the other challenge of Mars. You can't just go to Mars whenever you want. You literally have to go when the planets are aligned. And there's a specific window that you can go. And it's usually about every two years that it's OK.

9:59It's close enough that I have enough fuel to get there. What does the fact that something that was spec to last 90 days lasted 14 years mean? that guys like you did such a great job or no it means that's a great pr department because you sandbag there's two things there one is you want to keep expectations low and exceed expectations right so they intentionally like set it would be a great w if this worked for 90 days right and so then it works longer but the other thing is like going back to like you stack the dice in your favor at the end of the day it's a dice roll you have all these things that could be failures Sometimes if any one of them goes wrong, the whole mission is over.

10:43You just design everything as robustly as possible. And if nothing fails and it lasts for longer, then the mission ends up lasting longer. It's kind of out of your hands. Did your name get sent on Perseverance? Did I sign it somewhere or something? Like in the inside of the Macintosh, we signed it. Yeah. No public comment on that. Okay, that's a yes, everybody. Okay, one last question about Mars and NASA and stuff is when you read about Elon Musk saying we're going to put people there and they're going to live in all that, do you say, oh, that's my hero. He's doing it. Are you saying, what the hell is he thinking?

11:24He has no clue. No, I think Elon Musk is great for humanity. If he could just stay off Twitter and not be such an idiot. if you look at what he's done starlink would be someone's most crown jewel achievement that they've ever done getting internet out there for people ukraine ukraine is an example he did it just because he needed a little bit of cash to like run another business it's like his side hustle is something that's a really good idea so i think he has the ability to really his crystal ball is clearer i think in some ways than the average person for sure and he has other aspects about Making humans a multi-planetary species, yes, of course.

12:07That is absolutely, a backup plan is always a good thing. And I think he's doing more as an individual to push us toward that than anyone else. I can't fault him for that. He single-handedly got us into electric cars. Yeah, that's right. That's another side business. Yeah. And he really made it cool. And I think he really pushed that forward a lot faster than it would have happened otherwise. Okay. Now, sometimes history is rewritten. Is it accurate to say that you left NASA to make high-tech Halloween costumes? Yes, that actually is true. That's accurate. That is accurate, which is funny. Which is another one when I told my dad that at the time.

12:48He's like, it made sense. So what happened is my first YouTube video ever while working at NASA was like this Halloween costume. Where I had an iPad in front, iPad in back. If you do a FaceTime video chat, it looks like you have a hole in your body. because the front camera shows us in the back and vice versa. And that video went really viral. And I was like, my first video ever, it felt really good. It was like going back to the onions, cutting the onions in the kitchen so many years before. Except this time, instead of my mom taking a picture, it was like a bunch of strangers sharing this video.

13:19And I was like, well, I've got more ideas. And so since that time, I've done one video a month for over a decade now. And with that, the main comment on that Halloween costume was like, cool idea bro but I don't have$1 ,200 for a Halloween costume which got me thinking how can I make this cheaper and then the thought was like if you just have a normal t-shirt with a cool print on it a scary print with an eyeball and then you make a free app with an eyeball that moves all around like it's looking around you could cut a hole in the t-shirt you could duct tape your phone to the back of the t-shirt and now you have like a super chill really wild Halloween costume so I worked nights and weekends that whole year to come up with this idea 24 shirts free app and we launched it and it was a banger success.

14:01And so from that, there's a company in the UK who wanted to buy it and bring me with it. And it was a great deal for me. It made sense. And it was like a fun opportunity. So I did that for two years. I still lived in California, but I would go over to the UK every couple months and work with those guys. And then my boss's boss from NASA eventually called me he had come up to work at Apple and he's like, Hey, I think I would love to have you on my team. I think we really need you up here. And I was like, Oh, this seems like a cool next opportunity. And that's what moved me up to the Bay area.

14:42And can you talk about what you did at Apple? I can talk more about this than I do, but I can say there's a patent that I'm the lead author on, which is kind of nice. Cause you You can talk publicly about that. And I will say Patently Apple is like a website who covers Apple's patents. They called it the patent of the decade. And it's all about using virtual reality in self-driving cars. And what does that mean when you combine virtual reality with the fact that you have a self-driving car? Because if you think about it, when self-driving cars come around, like 40 % of people get motion sickness.

15:16And so 40 % of the population will have all this free time, but they can't utilize it because they need to be like looking at the road. Are there ways to mitigate motivation sickness with virtual reality? Are there ways to create some really interesting entertainment opportunities? Because if you think about it, a car is like the world's greatest simulator, motion simulator, because you're actually moving. Whereas like on Star Tours or one of these things, when you need to accelerate, the seat turns back 90 degrees. And that kind of does feel like you're accelerating forward, but then you're not feeling pressure on your butt.

15:48It just feels a little bit off. But in a car, you'd actually feel 1G down and you get the accelerations in different directions. What does that mean when you pair it with a zombie apocalypse experience? Right? If you close your eyes and go over a speed bump, from personal experience, I've thought about this, it feels a lot like running over a zombie. And by the way, the car knows where all the potholes are because it talks with other cars. So you could design a very interesting simulation that feels very real. And if you get to a red light, in real life, it's just a red light. But in this zombie apocalypse game, you get there and it's like the car dies.

16:23And you're like, come on, go, go, go, go. The light turns green right at the right time. You can pull off. And that's like a zombie game. But there's also if you're stuck in traffic on the freeway and you just want to motivate that the motions you're feeling, because that's what motion sickness is when weight doesn't match up with your internal gyro. So now instead of just being stuck in traffic on the freeway going home, maybe you're on a lazy river. And when the road turns right, the river turns right. And when you need to stop because there's a car in front of you and it's about traffic, like a little log comes up and your canoe stops.

16:54So this is really interesting. And that's like just the tip of the iceberg, but it was a very extensive patent. So that's all I could say about my time at Apple because that's public information. I'm just talking about publicly what's in that patent. Have you considered talking to Joby? Because Joby has the same sort of needs, right? Virtual reality flying is even. Yeah. And the answer is no, because Apple isn't that bad now. I want to stay clear of their lawyers. Okay. Listen, I have a rich history with Apple. Yeah, I know you do. I know you do. And the thought of Apple making a car, they're going to spec special electricity.

17:38And there's going to be a dongle, but the dongle will be$10 ,000. And the car will be really great, but only go 75 miles or four hours. Yeah, that's right. And somehow they'll convince you that it's like the best thing and you'll believe it. Apple's good at that. You have an iPhone. Yeah. This is a 13. Okay. Okay. I will buy the 15. This morning I placed an order for a GoPro 12 too. You guys use GoPros? So we don't anymore. And you want to know what we use instead? Reds. iPhones. Really? I'm serious. We have like 20 iPhones that we film with. You don't use Reds or so many Alphas or anything? No.

18:19I mean, so we do have our primary cameras are like Panasonic GH5s or whatever. But like 30 % of the shots in all my YouTube videos are on an iPhone. Really? Yeah, they're great. They have great dynamic range. And on YouTube, if a TV show puts, you know, Discovery Channel puts something on YouTube, it never does well because it's too polished. So there's a little bit of on YouTube, you want to be authentic. Who I am right now talking to you, this is who I am. It's who I am in my videos. And I think people could sniff that out. And so by having a lot of the shots on an iPhone, it's whatever. This is more just about capturing what's actually happening versus this super polished thing with everything just perfect.

18:59I think it works better. And they're just way easier to use. And they don't overheat freaking GoPros. Sorry, GoPro. I surf and I use a GoPro. and I swear 20 % of the time it crashes in the middle of it and there's nothing you can do except pull out the battery and put it back in except that's very risky in the water yeah and then I don't know why but the date and time is always off that's funny and then it saves it to the wrong folder and like you know GoPro this is version freaking I know can we just get it reliable or How they even name their files. Like when you record, if you have a clip that's longer, it's like GH.

19:40It's not even sequential, which I don't understand. And you think they would have fixed that by now. Yeah, I don't know. Not to bash GoPro, but I'm happy to hear someone in a completely different industry also have issues with them. I can't tell you how many times we have not got an amazing shot that I really wanted because it just stopped recording or it overheated or whatever. So I was just like, we're done. We interviewed Garrett McNamara. Yeah. and the 100 foot wave guy yeah and he uses gopros he has the same issues oh really yeah and it's one thing for you to do another take with a squirrel jumping over yeah 100 foot wave but not always you know we have this elephant toothpaste experiment that was like a hundred and some on thousand dollars just for all the chemicals we're doing some big old world record it's this foam that creates this chemical reaction to the sky and we had like three gopros inside like the money shots they all overheated didn't get the shot so i would argue no it's not always just a squirrel guy okay so now we're going from apple to youtube yeah a more general question like how did you make these transitions how did you go from rocket scientist to costume maker yeah virtual reality to youtuber yeah so it's interesting i'm a very conservative person i want to say that right now i i don't feel like i make you mean you think trombone yeah not politically not talking politically i am very conservative in nature as an engineer and so i agree on paper when you look at some of the decisions i made and some of the bets i've made that they seem big but then at the time and i think this is maybe it's a blessing and a curse but it feels like the next move is very obvious.

21:28And I think that's always been the case for me where it's like, it feels very clear. I don't have a crystal ball that works five, 10 years in the future, but my one year crystal ball, I feel is pretty good. And I don't swing at a lot of pitches, but the pitches I swing at are the juicy ones that I feel like, yep, this is 100 % gonna be a thing. I beg to differ. I saw the wiffle ball video. True. Wiffle ball outside. Yeah, I think as an example, when I finally left Apple, at that point, to be fair, I had 10 million subscribers when I finally left Apple. And most people will use... Wait, wait, wait.

22:04You had 10 million? Yeah, yeah. When I left Apple five years ago. And Apple PR Nazis, they weren't shutting you down saying you can't be this public. You're like... No, they tried. And? You quit? No, no. So when I first went to work there, they told me I couldn't make YouTube videos. And I only had 180 ,000 subscribers then. and I was like well forget you guys you asked me to work for you and I told them no and they're like fine at least when you come here you have to wait three months to release a video I was like guys you don't have to worry about it it's not like my videos get that many views anyways the first video I waited three months the first video I did was just like how to skin a watermelon video it's this dumb video of it just has a really good thumbnail it got like 40 million views in a week.

22:49It's still to this day is my most viewed video because it just has this really wacky thumbnail of this watermelon shell that's peeled open and you see like a shaved watermelon inside. Anyways, so that was my start with them. And then, but I just said, I would never say I worked for Apple. I would keep it quiet. Right. And then I had an opportunity to go on Jimmy Kimmel. They reached out to me and I asked Apple, I was like, Hey, can I do this? It went all the way up to a senior VP. I won't say his name, but you know who he is. And he's like, look, we should be focused on making great products. That was the answer.

23:26So it wasn't like a no, but I was like, at first I was like, oh crap, I can't do this. Then I was like, hold on. They can't tell me I can't play badminton on the weekend. Like as long as I don't say I work for Apple, his response of not being no basically tipped me off that legally he couldn't say no type of thing. And so I was like, okay, forget this I'm doing it and I did it and to this day I ended up going on Jimmy's show like eight times I hosted his show we're really good friends I spend the night at his house anytime I'm in LA so it was like it was a really good move for me to not take that advice of not going on but a show the evangelist and marketer in me would say holy shit this is a gift from God that I got this person who's rank and file employee who has 30 million followers and gets 40 million views like I'll let them introduce the next Apple walk no no because that to in their mind and to be honest I think they're right there's just no upside Apple doesn't need someone saying hey do you know about Apple so it's all just downside when I have some controversy like obviously that's not going to happen or knock on wood let's get that like i'm pretty conservative even my personal life with stuff so i don't think i'm going to get canceled but if i did if there was some event it only can say oh this guy also works for apple and so they just don't want any of that they want to be fully in control of their destiny on the other hand they got to spend so much effort sucking up to marquez and i justine in fact they own a marquez or i justine right yeah but like they always have that layer of separation where they're just an independent journalist.

25:03That's just different than them being an Apple employee. Yeah. So anyways, all that's to say, I quit my job at Apple when I had 10 million subscribers and I loved my team. The people I worked with were awesome. They wanted me to stay. And I loved the job I did there, but it was just getting too big, the YouTube thing. So I ended up going full-time obviously to do this. And then recently we We launched Crunch Labs, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit. And that was another example where it's like, this just is clearly the right thing to do. And yeah, it's gone well. And when this clearly the right thing to do feeling happens, is it an epiphany or is it like a little acorn that grows over the course of this?

25:46Yeah, that's a great question. Finally, it's a tree. I'd say it's more, it's a combination. It's like an acorn, but I would say a lot of the growth happens very quickly. And by very quickly, I mean like in a matter of hours. You get the gestational idea, and I feel like 70 % of building out the meat on the bones happens. Like I just get really excited, and I just start writing things down. Of course, this seems so obvious, right? And then the rest grows like maturely over time because the devil's in the details. Execution is what really matters. but that first vision of just getting stoked about what something could be like that apple patent as an example most of the ideas in that really really long patent came in a matter of an hour and a half right when i first had the idea and i was like shaking i was like oh my gosh there's so much here yeah how often do you get those hour and a half not it's for the big ones it's for the big ideas and it happens i make monthly videos too so sometimes if i have a video idea and i'm like oh this is great and i could do this and it could be this that's a familiar feeling to me just from the monthly video cadence.

26:50But like the big ideas, for example, the toy company Crunch Labs. Yeah. Once it made sense and the story is actually Kimmel was the one. I was spending the night at his house because we had just done a fundraiser for my son who's on the autism spectrum. We did a big fundraiser on my channel. And it was that night after we'd done it, like a four hour live stream. He's like, you really need to make a product for kids. He's like, I don't think you realize what you have and what you mean to people, but people trust you. And my standard response is no. Like whenever someone tells me I need to do something, like write a book, go on tour, do a podcast, for example, guys, I'm always like, why?

27:29And when we keep asking why and get to the root of it, it's so I can make more money. And it's like, I have enough money. I don't spend that much money. I'd rather focus on the things I really love and focus on those and make those excellent and amazing and not just inundate myself and spread myself super thin. So when Kimmel told me this, I was like, my answer is no, I don't need to, Jimmy. I enjoy making these monthly videos. But then just the more I thought about it, it's like, yeah, you can only learn so much passively watching a video. But if you actually had a toy that was really, really fun, I taught a physics principle.

28:00There's a video for me explaining the physics principle. And you got that every month. And the concept is teach you to think like an engineer. It's literally on the box. then it's like you can reach kids on at a deeper level and he was definitely right that there's the right move to do because it's gone fairly well so now it helps make the youtube videos even better so it's like there's a virtuous cycle of just reaching more really everyone but especially the young folk to get them stoked about science and engineering it's really helped me level up so how do you define yourself are you an evangelist for stem basically you're not just trying to get a bunch of views so you can monetize your feed.

28:38Yeah, that's right. 100%. That's right. At the end of the day, I think we can all agree. My definition of success is do you have a net positive impact on the world? There's a lot of people who I think by the world's success or by world's definition of success, maybe they've made a lot of money, but they're just kind of shitty people. It's like a net negative effect on the world. And I think by that definition of success, I just want to have a net positive impact on the world. And I think the way I can do that most is I've done something with these videos. I realized that I can hide the vegetables well.

29:12Basically, if you want someone to learn something and you say, hey, you need to learn something, they're going to shut down. But if you have a picture of the world's largest Jell-O pool and you're in the Jell-O and it says 15 ton Jell-O pool and that's the clickbait and you click on it because you want to see that. And sure enough, I'm building the world's largest Jell-O pool. But what I'm also doing is teaching about the scientific method and how you actually make jello and how all the failures we encountered to get to this thing. And you're learning about chemistry. So it's like hiding the vegetables of the real meat with this, you know, covering of this really interesting thing to suck you in.

29:44And so I think that carrot versus the stick approach to education and getting stoked about science is something that I've realized I can do well. And so this just helps me amplify it because there's a lot of big problems in the world. And we're in like an all brains on deck situation. So the more kids that I can play some small role in inspiring to enter the steam and stem fields, then that feels pretty good to me. We interviewed a woman named Wanda Harding, who also worked for NASA. And she was the person who could have said, rover doesn't go, curiosity doesn't go. She was the manager. she had she made the call okay and after her very successful career at nasa she went to national noaa national ocean atmospheric or whatever right yeah yeah successful there and now she's teaching students in georgia math and physics right oh what grade do you know yeah So she went from NASA to...