Mark Rober’s Odyssey: From NASA to YouTube Fame

Guy Kawasaki:
I'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. Well, 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. And now, here is the one and only, remarkable, Mark Rober.
You're cutting onions at home in your kitchen.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
You are wearing goggles now, or have you found something.
Mark Rober:
If you want the truth, we're just getting right to the truth, I DoorDash everything now.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So much for that.
Mark Rober:
Yeah. It's still a good story though.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, so the story we're talking about is that when he was a kid, he created these goggles.
Mark Rober:
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 a common life hack, but this was before then and I was a frigging six-year-old, and I just remember her making a big deal about that, and it made me feel good. "Oh, 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 only had twenty-four on a roll, so you were pretty judicious. And so we still have that picture in the family.
Guy Kawasaki:
You do?
Mark Rober:
Of me, yeah, cutting onions.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ah.
Mark Rober:
I think if you Google Mark Rober cutting onions, it's online somewhere. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
We've got to look for that picture. Okay. Speaking of your parents, what do you tell your parents you do now?
Mark Rober:
Yeah. It is funny, because 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 and you iterate. So a lot of the skills I learned in real life work for what I do today on YouTube. But 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 because I did pranks a lot, 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 fart-spraying glitter on YouTube. I'm building obstacle courses for squirrels in my backyard, dad."
Guy Kawasaki:
You're having Wiffle ball drones.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, Wiffle ball drones. Yeah, basically any sport, automatic bullseye dart boards. 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?"
Guy Kawasaki:
That's why we brought the surfboard.
Mark Rober:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. The first major area is NASA and JPL.
Mark Rober:
Mm-hmm.
Guy Kawasaki:
So first of all, how does it feel to send a machine seven months away, 300 million miles away, and there's no mechanic?
Mark Rober:
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 twelfth 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 one with three additional decimal places for accuracy of inches, it needs to be that length, because if an arm's coming by, the precision can matter, because it has to work. And so therefore, that bolt is a forty-five dollar bolt. So yeah, it's a little bit terrifying to send something to Mars. And your job is done, 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 thirty minutes to get a signal from Mars to Earth, and it takes only seven minutes to go from the upper atmosphere, the start of entry, descent, landing, twenty-five thousand 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 twenty-three 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, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if there was ever an application for artificial intelligence, that's it. It's in the rover. And if you can't do anything for twenty-three minutes, at least if there's AI there.
Mark Rober:
It's more simplified, because it's more like a decision tree. If it feels this hot, then do this. If you're going too fast, then do this. I think currently for just the entry, descent, landing, it's like a very brute force version of AI, in a sense.
Guy Kawasaki:
What was the hardest mechanical system to make on the rover?
Mark Rober:
It's interesting, because when people ask me these questions about the rover, nobody really knows what the rover is. Because I know my hardware that I 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 rover, but they don't know it individually.
So it's like this weird emergence thing, where we're all little ants, and the colony does this amazing thing, but 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 hot. When the sun's not, it's very cold. It's like being in a desert on Earth, but to a much more extreme.
Guy Kawasaki:
Like Burning Man without the rain.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, exactly. And metal grows, everything grows and shrinks depending on the temperature. And the variation's more, it grows and shrinks more, so that creates a lot of problems. Not to mention, I know we had a lot of problem 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 the actuators, we really struggled 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 okay, it's close enough that I have enough fuel to get there.
Guy Kawasaki:
What does the fact that something that was specked to last ninety days lasted fourteen years mean? That guys like you did such a great job.
Mark Rober:
No, it means NASA has a great PR department, because you sandbag. There's two things there. One is, you want to keep expectations low and exceed expectations. They intentionally set: it would be a great win if this worked for ninety days, and so then it works longer. But the other thing is, going back to 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. And so you 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 out of your hands.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did your name get sent on Perseverance?
Mark Rober:
Did I sign it somewhere or something?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Like in the inside of the Macintosh, we signed it.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, no public comment on that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. That's a yes, everybody. Okay, one last question about Mars and NASA and stuff, when you read about Elon Musk saying, "We're going to put people there and they're going to live," and all that, do you say, "Oh, that's my hero. He's doing it"? Or are you saying, "What the hell is he thinking? He has no clue"?
Mark Rober:
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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ukraine.
Mark Rober:
Ukraine is an example. He did it just because he needed a little bit of cash to run another business. It's like, his side hustle is something that's a really good idea. His crystal ball is clearer, I think, in some ways than the average person, for sure. And he has other aspects about him. Making humans a multi-planetary species, yes, of course. 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
He single-handedly got us into electric cars.
Mark Rober:
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've happened otherwise.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, sometimes history is rewritten. Is it accurate to say that you left NASA to make high-tech Halloween costumes?
Mark Rober:
Yes, that actually is true.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's accurate?
Mark Rober:
That is accurate, which is funny. Which is another one, when I told my dad that at the time, he's like “It made sense”. So what happened is, my first YouTube video ever, while working at NASA, was this Halloween costume wearing 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 that was like my first video ever, it felt really good. It was going back to cutting the onions in the kitchen, so many years before. Except this time, instead of my mom taking a picture, it's a bunch of strangers sharing this video. And I was like, "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 dollars for a Halloween costume," which got me thinking, how can I make this cheaper? And then the thought was like, well, 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 a super chill, really wild Halloween costume. So I've worked nights and weekends that whole year to come up with this idea, twenty-four shirts, free app. And we launched it, and it was a banger success. And so from that, there's a company in the United Kingdom who wanted to buy it and bring me with it.
And it was a great deal for me, it made sense. And it was a fun opportunity, so I did that for two years. I still lived in California, but I would go over to the United Kingdom 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, "Hey, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
And can you talk about what you did at Apple?
Mark Rober:
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 nice, because you could talk publicly about that. And I will say, Patently Apple is 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, 40 percent of people get motion sickness. And so 40 percent of the population will have all this free time, but they can't utilize it, because they need to be looking at the road.
Are there ways to mitigate motion sickness with virtual reality? Are there ways to create some really interesting entertainment opportunities? Because if you think about it, a car is the world's greatest motion simulator, because you're actually moving. Whereas on Star Tours, or one of these things, when you need to accelerate the seat turns back ninety degrees.
And that kind of does feel like you're accelerating forward, but then you're not feeling pressure on your butt. It just feels a little bit off. But in a car, you'd actually feel one gram down, and you'd get the accelerations at different directions. What does that mean when you pair it with a zombie apocalypse experience?
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 the car dies.
And you're like, "Come on, go, go, go, go." The light turns green right at the right time where you can pull off. And that's 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, a little log comes up and your canoe stops. So it is really interesting, and that's 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Have you considered talking to Joby? Because Joby has the same sort of needs, virtual reality flying.
Mark Rober:
Yeah. And the answer is no, because Apple owns that patent now. I want to stay clear of their lawyers. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Listen, I have a rich history with Apple, to put it mildly.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, I know you do, I know you do.
Guy Kawasaki:
And the thought of Apple making a car, they're going to spec special electricity, and there's going to be a dongle, but the dongle will be ten grand, and the car will be really great, but only go seventy-five miles or four hours.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's right. Then somehow, they'll convince you that it's the best thing, and you'll believe it. Apple's good at that. You have an iPhone. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is an Apple iPhone 13.
Mark Rober:
Okay, okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I will buy the Apple iPhone 15. This morning, I placed an order for a GoPro 12 too. You guys use GoPros?
Mark Rober:
So, we don't anymore. And you want to know what we use instead?
Guy Kawasaki:
REDs?
Mark Rober:
iPhones.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Mark Rober:
I'm serious. We have twenty iPhones that we film with.
Guy Kawasaki:
You don't use REDs or Sony Alphas, or anything?
Mark Rober:
No, no. So we do have, our primary cameras are Panasonic GH5S, or whatever. But 30 percent of the shots in all my YouTube videos are on an iPhone.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Mark Rober:
Yeah. They're great. They have great dynamic range. And on YouTube, if a TV show, 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. It's more just about capturing what's actually happening, versus this super polished thing with everything just perfect. I think it works better. And they're just way easier to use. And they don't overheat. Freaking GoPros. Sorry, GoPro.
Guy Kawasaki:
I surf, and I use a GoPro. And I swear, 20 percent 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.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And then I don't know why, but the date and time is always off.
Mark Rober:
That's funny.
Guy Kawasaki:
And then it saves it to the wrong folder. And GoPro, this is version freaking twelve.
Mark Rober:
I know.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can we just get it reliable?
Mark Rober:
Or how they even name their files. When you record, if you have a clip that's longer, it's not even sequential, which I don't understand. And you think they would've fixed that by now. Yeah, I don't know. Not to bash GoPro, but I'm happy to hear someone in a completely different street 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."
Guy Kawasaki:
We interviewed Garrett McNamara, the 100 Foot Wave guy.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And he uses GoPros, he has the same issues.
Mark Rober:
Oh, really?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. It's one thing for you to do another take with a squirrel jumping over something, but a 100 foot wave.
Mark Rober:
But not always. We have this elephant toothpaste experiment, that was like 100 and some odd thousand dollars, just for all the chemicals. We were doing some big old world record. It's this foam that creates this chemical reaction to the sky, and we had three GoPros inside, the money shots. They all overheated, didn't get the shot. So I would argue, no, it's not always just a squirrel, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So now, we're going from Apple to YouTube.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
A more general question, how did you make these transitions? How did you go from rocket scientist to costume maker, to virtual reality, to YouTuber?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, so it's interesting. I'm a very conservative person. I want to say that right now.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean you think Trump won?
Mark Rober:
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 maybe it's a blessing and a curse, but it feels like the next move is very obvious.
And I think that's always been the case for me, where it feels very clear. I don't have a crystal ball that works five, ten 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 percent going to be a thing."
Guy Kawasaki:
I beg to differ. I saw the Wiffle ball video.
Mark Rober:
True. Yeah, I think as an example, when I finally left Apple, at that point, to be fair, I had ten million subscribers when I finally left Apple.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait, wait. You had 10 million?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, yeah, when I left Apple five years ago, or whatever.
Guy Kawasaki:
And Apple PR Nazis, they weren't shutting you down saying, "You can't be this public?”
Mark Rober:
No, they tried.
Guy Kawasaki:
And, you quit?
Mark Rober:
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, "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."
I waited three months. The first video I did was this, how to skin a watermelon, video. It's this dumb video. It just has a really good thumbnail. It got forty million views in a week. And it 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 a shaved watermelon inside. Anyways, so that was my start with them. But I just said I would never say I worked for Apple, I would keep it quiet.
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'd know who he is. And he's like, "Look, we should be focused on making great products." That was the answer. So it wasn't a no, but 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. 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 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 a really good move for me to not take that advice of not going on the show.
Guy Kawasaki:
But 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 thirty million followers and gets forty million views. I'll let them introduce the next Apple Watch."
Mark Rober:
No, no. Because 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. Obviously, that's not going to happen or knock on wood. Let's get that. I'm pretty conservative, even in 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
On the other hand, they got to spend so much effort sucking up to Marques and iJustine. In fact, they own Marques or iJustine.
Mark Rober:
But they always have that layer of separation, where they're just an independent journalist. That'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 ten 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 launched CrunchLabs, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
And when this clearly the right thing to do feeling happens, is it an epiphany, or is it like a little acorn that grows.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's a great question.
Guy Kawasaki:
Finally, it's a tree.
Mark Rober:
I'd say 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, in a matter of hours. You get the gestation of the idea, and I feel like 70 percent of building out the meat on the bones happens like, I just get really excited, and I just start writing things down.
And "Of course, this seems so obvious." And then the rest grows 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 long patent came in a matter of an hour and a half, when I first had that idea.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Mark Rober:
And I was like shaking. I was like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much here." Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
How often do you get those hour and a half ideas?
Mark Rober:
No, it's for the big ones, it's for the big ideas. 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. But the big ideas, for example, the toy company, CrunchLabs, yeah, and the story is actually, Kimmel was the one. I was spending the night at his house because we'd 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, 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." Whenever someone tells me I need to do something, like write a book, go on tour, do a podcast, for example, Guy, I'm always like, "Why?"
And when you 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, that taught a physics principle, there's a video for me explaining the physics principle. And you got that every month, and the concept is, "Teach you to think an engineer," it's literally on the box. Then you can reach kids at a deeper level.
And he was definitely right. It was 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 really everyone, but especially the young folk, to get them stoked about science and engineering. It's really helped me level up.
Guy Kawasaki:
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.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's right. 100 percent, 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 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. Basically, 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, "fifteen-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, what I'm also doing is teaching you about the scientific method, and how you actually make Jell-O. And 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 covering of this really interesting thing to suck you in.
And 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 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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," or, "Curiosity doesn't go." She was the manager of that.
Mark Rober:
Oh, wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
She made the call.
Mark Rober:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
And after her very successful career at NASA, she went to NOAA, National Ocean Atmospheric, or whatever, right?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Successful there. And now, she's teaching students in Georgia math and physics.
Mark Rober:
Oh, what grade? Do you know?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So she went from NASA to teaching.
Mark Rober:
Oh, so this is my dream job. I want to be a high school physics teacher.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, I swear. I started getting my credentials five years ago, and then things just really picked up and got crazy, but I want to teach in a class. Obviously, I'd be a volunteer high school physics teacher. But that's where it really clicked for me, that I love this stuff. And you could explain the world around you in math and equations, was my high school physics class.
And in this time that we are talking here, I'll just tell you, I'm going to pull out my phone and look at my YouTube analytics. In the time that we are having this conversation, Guy, I want to tell you how many other households I'm also in, which is, let's see here. Give me one sec. I haven't released a video in two and a half months, so it's not like the channel is necessarily popping right now. But in the time the listeners are listening to this podcast, I'll be in 400,000 other homes, on just a random day.
400,000, that's five really big football stadiums of people, which is kind of terrifying to think about for me. So it's like I can reach a lot of people, but I don't get, selfishly, that moment of seeing that, "A-ha," which I crave. I love those a-ha moments for myself, when something clicks, and it's, "Oh, I get that." That's such a good feeling, that if I'm teaching high school physics, I get to see that selfishly.
Guy Kawasaki:
But it's only going to be twenty kids there.
Mark Rober:
But this is why, admittedly, it's a little bit of a selfish pursuit. Because I get to see that, I get to get that feedback. And arguably, if you say a YouTube video is one level, making these boxes every month is another level, being someone's teacher for years, another level of deeply impacting their lives. And what are they going to go on and do?
So this is what I love about teachers, is they're the ultimate sort of investors in human capital. Because I am the product of some amazing teachers who are, they, themselves, product of teachers before them. And with the teachers, you don't really ever get to see the full impact of your work, but it's like you are investing in people who will then go off and do, hopefully, amazing things and inspire other folks. It's this unbroken chain, back thousands of generations.
Guy Kawasaki:
You would love Wanda Harding.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, I love her already because she let the rover go. She was the one who made the call.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. And when I knew I was going to interview you, seeing as all you guys are rocket scientists, I sent an email to her saying, "I'm interviewing Mark, what should I ask him?"
Mark Rober:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
And she's the one who said, "How does it feel to send a machine like rover on a seven month, 300 million mile trip to Mars without a mechanic?"
Mark Rober:
I was wondering. I did feel like, "Oh, good knowledge, Guy. Good knowledge."
Guy Kawasaki:
You didn't think I was that smart. But the key is, when you realize you're not smart, you ask somebody like Wanda to help you look smart.
Mark Rober:
That's the real genius in the room.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's the key.
Mark Rober:
I completely agree with you, because you just made yourself way more smarter by basically creating a net. You know so many people, and by extension, then you are incredibly intelligent, because you could find out anything.
Guy Kawasaki:
You were telling me about all these trade-offs at any given moment, and you said, “so why are you doing this podcast?”
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Because you're not going to reach 400,000 people in my podcast.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Socks, it was the socks.
Mark Rober:
It was the socks, yeah. I generally don't do podcasts, Guy. But I know about you, I respect your work, so that's the answer. But to answer your question, I kind of say no to everything. This is very rare for me to say yes. In fact, part of it was the sock connection on the plane too, which is such a funny story, of how we met. Yeah, because I normally don't ever really talk to people on the plane. Yeah, and then I was talking next to someone who had a great story. She was an entrepreneur, she knew you, had such nice things to say about you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you know what the word ikigai means?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, I think so.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what's your ikigai?
Mark Rober:
Maybe I'm wrong, but is ikigai the thing that's like what your passion is, what you're good at, it's like the middle of all those things?
Guy Kawasaki:
Why you live.
Mark Rober:
Can you remind me what those four buckets are? Because I think this is such a beautiful concept.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's not necessarily a Venn diagram of what you're good at, what you like, what you can get paid for. It's obviously a Japanese term. And they always show the video of this guy who's been making Samurai swords for thirty years, and it takes six months to make one sword, and it's his ikigai. My ikigai is podcasting. So it's your reason for getting up in the morning, it's your reason for living.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's not so much about the intersection of money, talent, and interest.
Mark Rober:
Got it, got it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what's your ikigai?
Mark Rober:
For me, it's getting people, but especially young people stoked about science and engineering and education. And I also love making these videos and telling stories. And I just can't believe it. Honestly, once a week, I'm looking at one of my people I work with here, and I'm just like, "I cannot believe we get paid for this. This is bonkers."
Guy Kawasaki:
Is that what you say?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's right. I can't believe it, when we're just doing something ridiculous, or blowing something up, or building something crazy. My next video is the world's smallest Nerf gun, because I hold the record for the world's largest. And it's so small, we kind of go down in stages. The final one, we literally folded DNA to make a Nerf gun, working with the Salk Institute. You could fit, I think it's 2,000, if you laid them end-to-end across the width of a human hair.
And it's learning about what they do at Salk, and just the process of that whole video. On top of these explosions, we've got so much stuff going on. Right now, we're at CrunchLabs. There's so many cool things I could show you around here, future videos and ideas we've got. Honestly, once a week, I'm just like, "This is bonkers."
So that is my ikigai. If you could max out on one attribute to have in your life, I think it's gratitude and contentment. And I think people like you, who are very successful, or an Elon Musk type, where you have a very dopaminergic brain, which means that you're really focused on what's next, very ambitious, basically never satisfied. It's a curse to have a brain like that. You get a lot done, you accomplished a lot in your lifetime, but you never feel like you ever accomplished very much, because you're always focusing on the next thing. That's the role of dopamine in our brain.
And so I think contrast that with someone, let's say maybe they just have a very simple life and existence, and by the world's standards, they don't do much. Maybe they never even have kids. They just, "Hey, I have my show I like to watch. I work in this factory." So there's something in between those.
There's a happy medium, like everything in life. There's a middle ground. And I do struggle with thinking of the next big thing and just getting stoked about the next thing, and sometimes forgetting to live in the moment. But it's something I really consciously try and make an effort, of being just really content and grateful for what I have.
And one life hack for that, for me, is to go back ten years. And if ten years ago I knew I'd be in this position, I would literally die on the spot. My brain would explode. The people I get to work with now and the things we get to do, if I knew about this when I was fifteen years old, it's just bonkers.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think when forty million people watch a video, there's going to be quite a few fifteen-year-old to see that and look back and say, "That was a turning point in my life. I saw that video. I saw the Jell-O, I saw the Wiffle ball, I saw the Squirrel Olympics, and I thought, I can do that. I love science. Let's do it."
Mark Rober:
Yeah, and it's pretty cool. More and more, I'm hearing more of those stories as time goes on. I just did the MIT Commencement speech, and they told me the reason they did that is they asked the students who would they want to speak. And they said, overwhelmingly, my name came up.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. How much greater praise can there be?
Mark Rober:
Right? I know. And these kids have grown up watching my videos, and these are next generation's best and brightest engineers. So that's an example. Yeah, it's hard to really process what that means, but I'm just going to put my head down and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And I think twenty years from now, it will bear out to be the right decision. And I'm glad I did this versus pursuing a career in Hollywood or something. Not that anyone in Hollywood would ever want me. I'm a terrible actor.
Guy Kawasaki:
You'd have to be on strike right now.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's true too.
Guy Kawasaki:
Have you decoded the DNA of making a video go viral?
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
You have?
Mark Rober:
Yeah. Honestly, I have a good answer to this. That's absolutely correct. That's pretty simple.
Guy Kawasaki:
Probably the first person to ask it, isn't it?
Mark Rober:
Yeah. And the answer is, this is true. You just have to evoke a visceral response in the viewer. Whether it makes them laugh, makes them feel amazed, makes them feel wonder, it makes them feel angry. You just have to make them feel something. No one's going to share a video that they don't finish watching. And unfortunately, today in our culture, anger is one of the easier ones to stoke and to get views on.
Even someone on Twitter, it's like they'll realize, "Oh, the hot take I had that was really polarizing is the one that got the most views and likes. I'm going to have more hot takes and more angry things to say, because it feels good that people see my thing and I get attention."
So that's the answer. As humans, if we feel something, then we will act on it. For example, sharing the video. Now, the hard part is how do you get them to feel something? And like I said, anger's a cheap way to do it. As an example, like I said, world's largest Nerf gun, or world's smallest Nerf gun, or world's largest Super Soaker, or world's largest Jell-O-Pool.
By just being world's largest, it's something that's never been seen before, and so inherently, you stack the dice that they feel like they're going to see something that's going to make them feel amazed. Because, "This is the first time I'm seeing this, it's bigger than anything I've ever seen." So it's like that aspect of it.
And then also, if you could tell stories. A lot of people had made videos about squirrels in their backyard before I made mine, but they didn't really name the squirrels Fat Gus and give them backstories, and really create the story around it quite like I did.
And I think that's something people think, "Oh, you're a good engineer and you make these videos," but if I had to pick one thing, I think there's tons of engineers that are way better than me, truthfully. That's not feigned humility. I'm an okay engineer, but I'm a pretty good storyteller, Guy. And that it comes down, in the end, and packaging that, specifically a storyteller in the form of video.
And so for a lot of these kids, they're seeing these videos, and for the first time, they're having these visceral responses to a media, someone they don't know. And so I think it creates a very interesting link in their brains, where they're feeling emotions like, "This feels cool. I want to do that. I want to be that." So it's this hack into their brains, that I'm planting these seeds and putting it in the right soil.
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely.
Mark Rober:
And I'm stoked to be doing it.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you do these videos, and your storytelling is off the charts, I agree, but is it carefully scripted and planned, or are you out there in the field, and you say, "Okay, let's name the squirrels now. And let's get a Wiffle ball that we cut in half, we put a brass slug in it"? How much is scripted in advance and how much is Mark real-time?
Mark Rober:
I write the videos, is always the very last step. We've been working on this world's smallest Nerf gun for over a year now. The video will release in a week and a half. I am just now looking at all the footage and writing what the script is. That's my process. It's scripted in the sense that, so for the squirrels example, we had 10,000 hours of squirrels, filming that.
And that's what people don't realize. When you're filming on iPhones and it's, "Oh, it's just this dude in this backyard." I had so much footage that we combed through. And so at that point, people are like, "Oh, those squirrels are like actors. How did you get them to do everything just so perfectly?" With 10,000 hours of footage, I can tell whatever story I want.
Or we're going to do the world's largest elephant toothpaste video. Or I went to Rwanda and covered this company called Zipline that are delivering blood through the sky on drones, and they've reduced maternal mortality rate by 88 percent. I went to Rwanda, I just knew I wanted to cover them, I just filmed a bunch. And then I come home with the footage, and then I piece together how to tell the story.
Guy Kawasaki:
And getting down to brass tacks, tell me, are you using Premiere or iMovie?
Mark Rober:
Premiere Pro. Yeah, Premiere Pro, yeah. Most editors do. Final Cut, people are starting to go back to that. Apple just stopped supporting it for a really long time.
Guy Kawasaki:
You got burned if you were on Final Cut.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, they've come back around and are now trying to support it again, but they've lost so much market share. So I'd say by and large, most YouTubers use Premiere. And then in industry, it's like Avid and other more professional tools.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you sitting on a super-duper three monitor, Mac Pro, just 25,000 dollar Macintosh? You're not doing it on your iPhone, right?
Mark Rober:
No. The funniest story about this is I bought, you know how Apple has, what's it called? The Mac, that one's desktop tower. I maxed it out. And I'm embarrassed to say how much I paid for that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Tens of thousands.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, it's more than a car. Because I was like, I don't spend my money on other stuff, I should spend it on this so it's really fast. And for whatever reason, the way Apple does their graphics cards and the way Premiere does, it's literally no faster than my freaking laptop, which I'm like, "Ugh."
So if anyone's listening, don't spend money on the big fancy Apple thing. Just a laptop is fine. But we do things, like in the workflow, making proxies, so versions of the video that are lightweight, so you can scrub through easy. And when we do that, honestly, you can edit from a laptop. It's fine.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if you end up with a twenty-five-minute video, how many man-hours or person hours went into that?
Mark Rober:
So are you talking editing, or just everything?
Guy Kawasaki:
Everything.
Mark Rober:
So it's a great question, because this is the thing people are most shocked by. When they come and actually film with me for a day or just are around me, they're amazed at the amount of work that goes into a video. Most of these videos take a year to make and build.
I have my next twelve videos planned out, and we're working on them in different stages. How many man-hours? If you add everyone up, because I still edit the videos, I write the video. I have people who help me edit, but I spend eighty hours just myself editing and writing every single video. But thousands of man-hours.
Guy Kawasaki:
Thousands.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
To get one hour.
Mark Rober:
No, to get freaking fifteen minutes, Guy. Yeah. So that's the thing. When you watch from my videos, it's very punchy. We're going from one thing to the next. I just pack a ton in there. Because I just want it to be a very engaging experience. Mr. Beast, my buddy, takes that to the next level. His are just like, "Really?"
But I do the equivalent of science, not quite as insane, but I really just try and keep them moving. And so that's also a thing when we go and film with someone and we interview them, we're with them for three days. We always have to tell them, "We got a ton of footage here. We talk to so many people. Please understand, most of you won't be in the video. And those who are, it's going to be like three sentences." You know what I mean?
Guy Kawasaki:
So you know that doctor from the bed bugs episode?
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
You have hours and hours of him, and it comes down to 30 seconds of him just putting it on your arm?
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that’s right. But what's great about that though is you just get to pick the best parts, the funniest parts. And also, the other promise I make to everyone in my videos, is everyone comes out looking amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's like our podcast.
Mark Rober:
Damn it. I assumed we had this agreement, Guy, our agreement that you cut this where I'm saying all these terrible things. Don't cancel me, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
First stop is Apple General Counsel.
Mark Rober:
Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, so by doing that and just cherry-picking, I can really just make sure everyone sounds as smart as they really are. And sometimes people get nervous. Yeah, that's how I like to make the videos.
Guy Kawasaki:
It sounds like, push comes to shove, the secret to this is the editing.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, it's a combination. But yes, it's the writing, and I'd say more editing, I feel like writing is a better way to phrase it than editing. Because editing feels like, "Oh, you used the right sound effect or the right transition." But yes, the editing and the writing I think has a way more profound effect on the channel's success than people realize.
Guy Kawasaki:
But what do you mean by writing? Because most people would think writing is writing the script in advance. That's not what you're saying.
Mark Rober:
No, writing the script after the fact.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which is what? How do you write the script after?
Mark Rober:
Because I have all the footage in front of me, I watch it through. And then I'm like, "Oh, okay. This is a good moment." In the end, we landed here with this thing, so now I need to pick the clips that support this landing of this thing or let's say something fails in the end when we film it, I want to make sure at the beginning of the video to say, "Look, we're not sure if this part's going to work, but we're going to give it our best shot." So you frame it so that when that does fail, people have the right context for understanding why it failed. Right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun and I are co-authoring a book called Think Remarkable, as opposed to think different. And step one, we had about 200 interviews in the can, averaging 20 pages each of transcript.
Mark Rober:
Whoa, whoa.
Guy Kawasaki:
So that's, 200 times twenty, it's 4,000 pages. So we read 4,000 pages to write the book, after we read.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So in a sense, that was our raw footage.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, that's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
And we wrote the book afterwards.
Mark Rober:
It's exactly that. And you start picking out themes. Some people start saying the same things, then it starts crystallizing in your mind what the story is. To me, it's like, how in the world do you write something before? That boggles my mind.
When we have brought an editor on, this happened literally just yesterday, they're just like, "I don't understand. Where's the script? I have this footage, but what am I cutting to?" And my chief creative, Addy, was like, "I know it's weird. It's just how we do it around here. Just trust me. Just do this thing."
Because then I look at all the footage, and then it's, "Okay, this is the story. This is the script." I write the full script out, and then it goes back to the editors and me to then pick the shots. As I'm doing it too, I'm like, "Use this shot." I write this, "Use this shot." So I'm picking the shots as I write it.
Guy Kawasaki:
But what if you write something that you did not record?
Mark Rober:
I just don't write that. You think of it backwards. I only write what's recorded. So if I don't have a shot and something to support a statement or I go out and shoot it. I voiceover all my videos a bunch, so I have the ability in voiceover to say something, and then I can create motion graphics to make that point. So I do that a lot, where I really want to explain how carbon nanotubes are made, because that's how we made this tiny Nerf gun, so I'm going to just explain in voiceover and use motion graphics to do this thing.
But the intro to my video where it's like, "Today, we're going to go out and blah, blah, blah," that is absolutely the very last thing I write and film on every video. The part where I'm introducing what's going to happen is the very last thing I write, because I know at that point what happened, and I could set it up appropriately.
Because I want this spoonful of sugar to go down as smoothly as possible, and the more the story has a nice arc, and it's cohesive. And real life and chemistry and physics and science can be messy, and you don't know where it will land. So I do the cool experiment and make the cool thing, film it all, see where the pieces landed, and then figure out a way to weave a tapestry that goes through each of those bits.
Guy Kawasaki:
With your glitter bombs, did anybody ever try to retaliate? They know where they got the package. Why don't they go back to your house?
Mark Rober:
Oh. So yeah, the first year we had them on my porch. After that, I never put them on the actual porch. We find people across the country who are willing to put them on their porch.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I thought you used yours.
Mark Rober:
Year one, I did. But after that, I realized, and even for year one, I partially did. A package actually got stolen from my porch, which was the impetus for doing this. But yeah, no, after that, we're all across the country.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Mark Rober:
And locally here, around this area, when we see a spot, a house that we think is good, we'll knock on the door and be like, "Hey, this has great visibility from the street. Are you cool if we leave this package on your porch?" And almost 100 percent of the time, they're like, "Hell, yes."
Guy Kawasaki:
And then when you show the video of the thief, and you don't blur out his or her face.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, you want to know why?
Guy Kawasaki:
Did they have to sign a release?
Mark Rober:
Yes. Yes, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
And they said, "I'm a dumbass, I will sign a release of me committing a crime"?
Mark Rober:
Yes, Guy. By the way, I don't say, "And if you sign this, I won't press charges," because that's against the law. That's me threatening them or something. That's not it at all. Some people just want to be internet famous, Guy. And they just don't care about their reputation like you think they would.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is like Candid Camera, except you're a criminal.
Mark Rober:
I know, and they love it. I wouldn't say they love it, but arguably, we just say it's for, "Oh, this is just a YouTube video." And sometimes, it's like you incentivize them with something like a Starbucks gift card. Not much. That was the trick Kimmel taught me, because sometimes they need to get people to sign releases.
And his producers are like, "Oh, yeah. It doesn't take much." But generally, yes, that's the hard and fast rule. If the face is blurred, I didn't get permission, or we weren't able to track them down. If the face is not blurred, I absolutely have a signed release somewhere where they say, "That's okay."
Because I'm not in the business of ruining someone's life over one stupid decision. Maybe this is the only time they did it. I'm not here to make that judgment. That's not my call. But if they give consent and say, "No, this is totally cool," then it's great. I'm going to use it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Last question is to do with the surfboard.
Mark Rober:
Okay. Oh, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. This is a short board, obviously.
Mark Rober:
Yeah, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So it's not for nose riding.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Or cross stepping.
Mark Rober:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. But I was watching the Wiffle ball episode, and ... what's it called? I want to say Coandă.
Mark Rober:
Coandă effect.
Guy Kawasaki:
And basically, you're saying that when fluid goes over a convex edge, it follows it.
Mark Rober:
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yep.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I think many people who surf, they think that what's happening that they can get to the nose is because the weight of the water on the back of the board is holding the board down.
Mark Rober:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
But you're saying that it's the physics of the effect of the fluid sticking to the side, right?
Mark Rober:
Yeah. Let's see. I think if you're nose riding on a longboard, is your point.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Mark Rober:
Let me just think of this through. I think though that's the opposite effect, Guy. Because the Coandă effect, specifically, so like a Frisbee, let's take a Frisbees as an example, because this is a good way to visualize it. Frisbees seem to float in the air, which is wild. How do they hover like that?
And it's the Coandă effect, where air is passing over the top and then it curves over the back. So it's basically taking this air, throwing a bunch of air downwards like a jet pack, which then conservation of momentum, equal opposite reaction, it pushes the Frisbee up into the air. It keeps the Frisbee in the air by curving air down.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh.
Mark Rober:
So I think this wouldn't be the Coandă effect, because if what you're saying is true, water comes up and goes down, it would have the opposite effect of pushing the board up.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ah.
Mark Rober:
And the thing is, the reason that, on Wiffle balls and Frisbees, they're super lightweight. That's why it has an outsize effect of keeping them in the air. They're so lightweight that the equal opposite reaction, pushing air down, does force the Frisbee up. Even if it was water going down and the Coandă effect is happening, it's curving over the edge, the surfboard weighs so much that effect is negligible. So I don't think it's the Coandă effect that's keeping the board in or out of the water in this case.
I imagine there's also some element of surface tension. We need to look at a video. I don't want to go outside of my domain here. There's obviously someone out there who knows exactly. But the Coandă effect absolutely is happening here, Guy. It definitely is curving over the surface, just like you said. You put a spoon in a flow of water, and it curves.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, right.
Mark Rober:
That's absolutely happening here. I'm not sure if that explains why you can go to the front of it. We'd have to look at some video. But here's what I love, Guy, this is what I love about this. You watch that video, you learned something, and you took it into your own life and started thinking about it. That's the highest compliment anyone could give me right there. You just made my day, right? You just made my day.
Guy Kawasaki:
So that's Mark Rober. Mr. Fart Bombs, Glitter Bombs, Squirrel Olympics, Bed Bugs, you name it. Check him out on YouTube. I guarantee that you will learn something, and you will be entertained.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. And one way we're doing that is Madisun and I have written a book. It's called Think Remarkable. That's a pun on think different, in case you're too young to know. So check that book out, it will help you make a difference and be remarkable.
My thanks to the staff of the Remarkable People team, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, sound engineers supreme. And then, there's the Nuismer sisters. They're like The Pointer Sisters, only of podcasting. Tessa, who prepares me and checks all the transcripts. Believe me, it's a lot of work. And Madisun, producer and co-author, not to mention, the drop-in Queen of Santa Cruz. And then, there's Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, and Fallon Yates. This is the Remarkable People team, and we are on a mission to make you remarkable. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.