Mark Rober's Brief But Spectacular take on being amazed at the world around us

Transcript

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Nick Schifrin: Tonight, we have a Brief But Spectacular take on being amazed at the world around us.

Mark Rober discovered his passion for engineering as a kid tinkering with gadgets and creating contraptions. Today, the former NASA engineer is a YouTube sensation who runs CrunchLabs, taking young minds and sparking their curiosity and innovation.

Mark Rober, Founder, CrunchLabs: And the greatest thing about engineering is, if something doesn’t exist and you want it to exist, you can just freaking will it into existence.

I think, for a lot of people, maybe they were in high school and they took a math or science class, and they didn’t get it. So they have this negative connotation to math and science and to physics. And that kills me.

I’m about to plug in this fan to test whether blowing on this sail will move the boat forward.

This is space and this is an egg moments before I attempted the world’s highest egg drop.

The channel now has 58 million subscribers. So there’s other people like you who said they weren’t good at science and they didn’t enjoy it who myself and other creators like me have kind of convinced, actually, there’s some part of your brain that does love this.

Just never looked at it in this way.

Oh, this is crazy. What am I doing?

I think the key to really learning something is to not frame it as learning. So, on my YouTube channel, I like to do what I call hide the vegetables. So you might see a really clickbait thumbnail of a 15-ton Jell-O pool, and it’s like, well, that’s real interesting. I’m going to click on that.

This is the world’s first ever actual pool of Jell-O.

Before you know it, you’re learning about the scientific method and chemistry. I have a handful of teachers that not only shaped my own learning process, but shaped the way I teach now.

Give me one second. You ask me about my teachers, I literally get a little bit emotional.

Shout-out, Mr. Malloy, my AP high school statistics teacher. Hands down, teachers are my favorite profession. I think they’re incredibly important. At some point, I’m going to retire from all this and be like a volunteer high school physics teacher. That’s my dream job.

After high school physics, I was like, what is the career that applies most to whatever this is? Like, this just feels really good in my brain. And I settled on mechanical engineering because, you could see there’s electrical engineering or chemical engineering. An electrical engineer can’t make the world’s largest Nerf gun. You need a mechanical engineer for that.

Straight out of college, I went and worked at NASA, and I was there for nine years, seven of those working on the Curiosity rover. I went and worked for about five years at Apple in their special projects group, and I signed a very thick stack of NDAs which tells me I’m not allowed to talk about it.

But I did have one patent I was the lead author on about using virtual reality and self-driving cars. That’s public. Don’t sue me, Apple.

My initial goal was just a creative outlet. Nobody knew you could make money off YouTube in those days. And I think over time, as I have seen response, especially from young folks, I have taken on this mantle of, like, I want to make engineering and science, like, not only accessible, but cool and interesting.

My favorite part of the job is knowing, like, I’m a freaking nerd. I’m like, I talk about science. And society actually is saying, hey, we like this.

Two for two, baby. Two for two!

My name is Mark Rober, and this was my Brief But Spectacular take on just being amazed at the amazing physical world around us.

Nick Schifrin: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.