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Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing.
We are launching on how I built this.
So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show, yes, on the show.
And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on earth.
And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business.
Imagine getting real-time branding advice from Sunbums Tom Rinks or marketing tips from Von Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey.
If you'd like to be considered, send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with.
And make sure to tell us how to reach you.
Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show.
You can send us a voice memo at hibt.id.wondery.com or you can call 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there.
That's it. And that's it.
Hope to hear from you soon and we are so excited to have you come on the show.
And now, on to the show. It was 15 tons of jello.
I would say, I forget the exact gallon size, but it's the size of a small in-ground pool.
And there was a hundred tests we did with gelatin at different temperatures to find out where the sensitivities are, how hot you need to get it, how cool does it need to get it.
It either worked or it didn't.
You had to have that shot of somebody jumping onto the jello and sort of like staying on the surface.
Yeah, the belly flop on the surface.
And we got it. What did it feel like, by the way?
Like swimming in snot. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, how Mark Rober's relentless curiosity drove him to create some of the most captivating videos on YouTube and to build a business around the motto, think like an engineer.
Hello everyone. So all this month on the show, we're talking about how content creators are building big businesses on social media.
Late last year, Goldman Sachs estimated that the creator economy will be worth $480 billion by 2027.
Before you decide to quit your job and become the next big influencer, know that there's a lot of competition.
In that same report, Goldman Sachs also estimated that more than 50 million people around the world call themselves content creators.
And to turn that job into a sustainable income earning profession takes a lot of work and not a small amount of luck.
In the case of my guest today, a single video can take years of experimentation before it comes to life.
Many of Mark Rober's videos cost over $100,000 to make, a few even cost more than a million.
And on average, his videos reach tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of people.
Mark's probably the most famous science YouTuber in the world.
And a big part of his appeal is that he makes science absolutely joyful and awe-inspiring.
Things like a backyard squirrel obstacle course or dropping an egg from outer space and watching it land intact.
It also helps that Mark has a background in physics and two degrees in engineering.
Before he became a full-time YouTuber, Mark worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Apple.
In fact, he started posting videos while he was working full-time and only left Apple in 2017 once he hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube.
Today, he has nearly 50 million subscribers.
And from his channel, he's also launched a significant business around science-themed products.
Each month, thousands of kids receive his science and engineering subscription boxes.
And what's particularly remarkable about Mark Rober's channel is that, compared to other big YouTubers, Mark has only produced about 144 videos in the 12 years he's been on YouTube.
Unlike other creators who churn out multiple videos a week or even multiple a day, Mark drops just one video a month.
So we wanted to find out, of course, how it came to be that a guy who wanted to be an engineer ended up a YouTube entrepreneur.
Mark Rober grew up in a family of five in Brea, California, near LA.
His dad was a chemical engineer and from an early age, Mark loved math, science, and solving problems.
One time, I was asked to cut onions for dinner.
And I remember this and it's like, oh, I don't want to cry.
Well, it seems really obvious.
I should go get the swim goggles from upstairs and put these on to cut the onions.
But now that's like a life hack you see a lot.
But at six years old, we have a picture of it.
You have to be really judicious with, you only have 24 pictures.
So the fact is an important moment in our family's history.
But that was the family I grew up in, where my mom took being a mom really seriously.
So as a stay at home mom, her thing was always like, hey, when you hit 18, I want you out of the house because you're going to be ready to face the world.
And yeah, I'd say math and science just always tickle my brain the right way.
And then especially high school physics, when I was like, this is cool.
You can explain the world around you using math and equations.
It doesn't matter what background you have, what language you speak.
We all get the same answer.
And not only that, but you can use it to predict the future.
Yeah. Right? That's how you land stuff on Mars.
And it's like a crystal ball that actually works.
You went to college, you grew up in Southern California, but you went to BYU in Utah.
You got there, you were 18 when you got there?
And tell me about your time there.
You studied mechanical engineering.
Yeah. And like realistically, I just do it, resonated with me of all the things I could pick to make a living.
This felt like it felt broad enough.
I just, let's start learning calculus and thermodynamics.
So you graduate from BYU with a degree in mechanical engineering and you get a job at JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
That's got to be a really hard job to get.
Man, I was so lucky. My resume was just in a stack of resume.
One of my teachers said JPL is hiring.
And I was like, oh, the speaker company?
Not realizing it was JPL, not JBL.
An interesting story there is like, I really wanted to work in Southern California and there was a company called Solar Turbines, or like a caterpillar company.
And I went and did that interview and basically at some point in the interview, I said, I started like making up an answer basically.
Yeah. It was just one guy in the round of panel of interviews and he's like, he lets me talk for two minutes and dig by Grave Deep.
Yeah. And he listens, goes, pulls a book off the shelf, opens it to an earmark page, turns it around and slides it over a table to the page that pointed out how totally wrong I was.
And like that experience and of course that blew me the job and that taught me that's like, it's okay to say I don't know.
Yeah. And so we went to JPL and did this whole round of interviews.
There's a guy named Don Bickler invented the rocker bogey system and they put you in his room.
They give you white burn marker and you have an hour and he just asks you a bunch of questions.
And two or three times in that interview, I was like, you know what Don, I just don't know.
I don't have a lot of background on this.
He's like, okay, great.
And he moved on to the next thing.
And at the end of that interview, my future boss came to come get me and he's like, this guy's great.
You should hire him. He's awesome.
And I was like, I'm so grateful it worked out that way because it's much more interesting to say I am a former NASA engineer as opposed to I am a former caterpillar employee.
So you get a job at JPL. And I mean, these are the people responsible for landing the Mars rover on the Mars.
You were there, I think, for what, seven years?
Nine years. Nine years.
Seven of those were working on the Curiosity rover.
Okay. And tell me about what did you sort of do on a day to day basis?
Yeah. I started out as a designer, so using CAD to design parts as an engineer.
And then eventually I transitioned to what's called a cognizant engineer there, which means that you're in charge of a chunk of the rover.
So my chunk was this hardware on the rover top deck where the arm would go dig in the dirt and then it would need to come and put the sample into the belly to do the analysis.
Your job was that arm. I was the door.
Sorry. The door, the interface between the arm and the belly.
Got it. This is the door that has to open so the arm can go out.
Yeah. This is the door that has to open so the sample that the arm gathers can be put into the belly of the rover.
Got it. Okay. So if it doesn't work, it's a bit of a bummer.
I'll say that much. There's no samples to analyze.
Yeah. You could do some analysis out on the end of the arm, but some of the core science we wanted really came down to these doors functioning like a door.
So you got to be really good at building a door.
I'm so good at doors, guy.
That's kind of my thing, especially like Martian doors.
These are like small doors.
It's like with little hinges.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
But it's one of those things that you don't realize until you have to send, like once you send something to space, you can't fix it, right?
Right. And if you're deciding something on earth, it's a lot cheaper because who cares if one bolt has a strip thread, just grab another one from the drawer.
There's no penalty there, right?
Yeah. When you were at NASA, I mean, did you see yourself as kind of a lifer when you were there?
Did you imagine that this could be where?
Yeah. Oh, 100%. Because I'm sure a lot of the people there are lifers because it must be an amazing place to work.
It is. That's 100% true.
And I had no problems working for the man, right?
Yeah. I kind of liked going in and just having a team and just being part of a bigger thing, right?
I think a lot of people are like, I've got to do my entrepreneurial thing because I can't, you know, but that wasn't me.
So I totally saw myself as a lifer.
As a lifer, yeah. All right.
So you're working on the Curiosity rover for a long time.
I mean, this is going to be sort of your, the crowning achievement of your time at JPL because of course it would result in the Mars rover successfully landing on Mars and doing what it needs to do.
In the meantime, I'm curious about making videos.
Is this something that you were particularly good at or adept at or just were kind of casual?
Like I'm assuming you had an iPhone and you would just make little videos or tell me about, you know, 2008, 2009, like, were you playing around with the videos?
Well, it goes earlier than that.
In high school, I made some videos that are like so embarrassing to watch.
I've sworn my friends. These are camcorders.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, camcorders, but that I edited with like two VCRs.
Okay, yeah, right. They're rough.
So you know, that was my first love of like, I've always just loved telling stories through like the medium of video.
In addition to being an engineer, that's just something that's always appealed to me.
While you're at JPL, you posted a visif, I think this is the first video you ever posted on YouTube, which you can still see and I've watched it.
And it's actually seen, been viewed by 13 million people.
And it's a very kind of what we might not now call a crude video.
It's just very simply shot.
You're like in your little studio apartment kitchen, whatever it was.
Yeah, here's an idea for a relatively simple Halloween costume.
So basically white shirt.
Yeah, so basically I wanted to make a Halloween costume where it looked like you had a hole in your body.
So I was thinking like, oh, a video camera on one and then a screen and then a video camera on the back and a screen.
And if you were to combine those feeds, you know, what you see on the front will be projected on the back.
So if you waved your hand in front of your stomach, the camera would film that and it would display it on the back.
So it looked like you literally had a hole in your body.
You were just looking right through your body.
That's right. And you had a hole.
And then I had that idea for like two years.
And then when the iPad came out, I was like, there it is.
This is it. Cut a hole in the front, cut a hole in the back and then you use some fake blood.
And so if I use two iPads and then basically duct tape and iPad to the front and iPad to the back and then start a FaceTime video chat and kind of looks like you got a hole in your body.
So you see it looks like you're looking through your body.
Exactly. And so I took that costume to like our Halloween party and everyone loved it.
And I was like, you know what?
Like my goal, my life goal was to be on the featured on the blog, Gizmodo.
Yeah. If I could do that, I would have made it.
So I was like, this is my chance.
Yeah. This is kind of newish website called YouTube.
I should upload this video there.
And the next day it had like a million views.
It was on the front page of CNN.com.
CNN, yeah. But you just put this up there because you thought it was funny or interesting.
That was it. That was the only.
Yeah. Did you get on Gizmodo?
Heck yeah. I got on Gizmodo.
They should have accomplished.
I'd peaked. Yeah. But truthfully, it was like, it was such a fun experience.
And I was like, you know what?
I have like other ideas.
Like what if every month I uploaded a video and there's this back when you didn't, you couldn't make money off you.
Right. There was no creator fund.
There was no creator fund.
There was no like idea of sponsorships.
It was just like uploading content for the sake of spreading cool ideas.
Right. And these are just like fun.
Like you would get an idea and you would say, oh, let me see if this will work.
Let me make a video. And that was basically it.
I mean, at the beginning.
Yeah. That was it. And even to this day, I try and hold true to this.
The more you're doing it with like just junk, you have lying around the house, the more it resonates with people because it's like, ah, why didn't I think of that?
That's so clever. I didn't actually do that.
Right. This is idea of relatability, especially as it pertains to something like complicated like engineering or physics.
Right. Like to this day, that's my North star.
I'm just like relatability.
If I can get someone who doesn't consider themselves to be mathier, sciencey to get it and have that aha moment like I know I've succeeded.
Did anybody know or was at the time, was that, were they aware that you're making videos that were increasingly becoming popular or how did they react to you?
How did they, were they like, oh yeah, that's so, how's your little video thing going?
Like what, what, what? Yeah.
I would say, you know, back then, yeah, it was just kind of a fun thing.
Like, oh, do you have a video coming up?
I don't think anyone was actually watching them.
I was getting like 50,000 views of video and that was like huge for me.
In fact, what I did, anyone who posted the iPad video, any news site or blog, I got all their information.
Every time I released new video, it'd be like, hey, Jeff, you posted my iPad video and it got you this many views.
I just released another one and I had a list of like 50 people I would send it to.
But it's, it's clearly you were experimenting with cameras and it was, it was fun.
I mean, the, the, probably the video where you were recognized or noticed internally was when the rover landed on Mars, you did a whole video about the people behind it.
But what I think makes JPL really great aren't its robots, it's the people who build them.
I can say this because I met a lot of them in the seven year span.
I got to work on Curiosity at JPL.
And you just kind of made that, you just put out there, you asked for permission, presumably.
No, I'm a different person now than when I started.
It's like the personal side of doing something that right that right, because like in the time I worked on the rover, my mom passed away from ALS.
I had a son, so it's like so much is wrapped up in seven years of your life to all come down to like seven minutes and either it works or it doesn't.
I tried to capture here exactly what it felt like.
And even still like I'm literally pinching my finger right now, so I don't get emotional on you.
But it's like that first picture of the rover come back from like the haz cam, which is very low res black and white of just the shadow of the rover on the Martian surface was just like such a moment in my life, like I'll never forget.
Probably when you made the video about about the Mars rover team and the JPL staff, internally people saw that and they liked it.
They probably appreciated it.
Yeah. And that got like a lot of views.
I mean, most of them at this point were getting a hundred thousand views.
They started getting up to occasionally I get one that was like 250, 300 on YouTube.
Yeah. On YouTube. And like those are big numbers.
Like I'm a viral video artist in a sense, right?
I'm trying to find broadly appealing topics to cover.
But you, I mean, it seems like there was an entrepreneurial kind of itch inside of you, right?
An engineer at JPL, but you're also a guy that like came up with iPad, iPad, the hole in the body.
And this actually led you to patent this design for a Halloween costume.
Like I wouldn't say I'm an entrepreneur.
I'd say I'm a slave to these ideas that come into my head.
And once they come in guy, if I don't try and follow through with them, they just eat away at my brain.
So you decided to turn this iPad thing into like a side hustle.
Yeah. Basically with the iPad costume, people were like, cool idea bro, but I don't have $1,200 for Halloween costume.
And so it's like, all right, fair enough.
So it's like, what can I do?
Is there a way to make this concept less expensive?
And then a few days after Halloween, I was thinking about this, what if, again, now that you have iPhones, you had a free app and you recorded your eyeball moving all around.
And then you had a picture on your shirt of like a really cool drawing of a clown head with a big eyeball.
And then you cut out the eye with scissors once you had the t-shirt and then duct tape your phone to the back of that.
You'd have like a $25 costume that would be epic.
And so the next year, literally a year after my first YouTube video, I worked nights and weekends on this concept.
We had 25 different animations, bunch of different shirt designs.
And a year later, I launched it.
I called it digital duds.
It cost me about $20,000, $25,000.
And then that first year, we grossed like $250,000 from that idea.
And so just to be clear, you sold t-shirts.
That was basically what you sold, but there were t-shirts that had like the hole in it where you could stick your iPhone.
Oh, no, no, no. That's too fancy.
It was just a print on the shirt and you had to manually cut out the part.
I got it, okay. The shirt, and then duct tape your phone to the back.
And the eyeball's looking all around the room.
Right. And it was really trippy to people.
Because that, and that was the app that you got.
That was the app. And the eyeball was on the phone.
And so you put in $20,000 to do this.
And then how did you advertise it?
Did you make another YouTube video?
Another YouTube video.
That's like my history of like advertising through a YouTube video, basically, right?
And you got $250,000 you made in revenue.
In revenue, but at the time, like I knew nothing about what margins are, how to get anything about a business.
So in the end, by the time we went to a trade show and demonstrated it to like the Halloween community, we literally broke even on it.
When you say we, who's the we?
Was it you? Okay, just me.
I'm just using the royal.
It was the royal you. Yeah.
And so, so you, but, but I mean, you, it was successful enough that you left JPL.
Well, so here's what happened is so we had that first year.
Yeah. And then I went to like a Halloween trade show.
This is where like Spirit Halloween goes and Walmart, all the fires go to see what the latest and greatest is, right?
And at that show, we had an offer from like Party City from Spirit and these guys, this company called Morph suits.
They're based in the UK.
It's like these skin type suits.
Yep. And they said, Hey, we want to buy this idea, but we also want you for your future ideas.
Wow. So it would require me like leaving NASA.
And was it, was it like life changing money for you?
It was like, um, it was like an earn out.
I think it was like a $250,000 signing bonus at that would, that would work against the earn out.
Yep. And honestly, in the end, I don't mind saying these numbers.
I think in the end I made a total of a half a million dollars from it.
Which, which at the time, even what you were earning at JPL, that was incredible.
But you would have to leave your job as an engineer at NASA was, even though the money of course was exciting for you at the time, was any part of you like, God, am I really, is this really like, should I really be going to like JPL engineer like, Hey dad, I'm going to work for a Halloween costume company.
Yeah, it's funny you should mention my dad because he's very conservative, right?
He's an engineer and to both him and I and other people I asked, it was like, it was an easy decision.
And it wasn't just about the money.
It was just like, this is an opportunity.
I really enjoyed being an engineer.
If it didn't work, it didn't work.
And you know, they were based in London.
I get to fly over there. I get to work remotely.
I just, just get a dip my toes in the water of what it's like to start a company, but with some guardrails.
They only had 30 people at the company.
So it was pretty small. So I got to see how a small company ran.
Yeah. It was a very inexpensive education.
In fact, they were paying me for it.
So I'm like, heck yeah. And meantime, you continue to make videos.
Yeah. Yep. And did you have a clear cadence like one a month or was it just one of, you said to yourself, I'm going to make one video a month on something.
Yeah. I'm curious about your, how you interacted with the camera because when you look at your early videos, you interact with the camera in a way that like 99.9% of people do.
It's just kind of chatting like you're in the same room with somebody.
And now your videos are very different.
It's, you are talking and presenting to people because that's, you have to, you have to jump out of the camera.
I know that. It sucks your energy, right?
It's a lot of it. It takes a lot of energy to record to camera.
But at the time, did anybody give you feedback or pointers or were you just making it and talking the way you talk?
No. It's kind of like a frog in boiling water type of thing.
When you go back and watch my videos, there's no one video where it changes.
Yeah. It's truly every video I'd watch the last one and be like, what could I improve on this?
And so you've end up getting a voice.
And if I had to say it, it's like, you know, guy, this is the voice I would use on YouTube.
And if we were doing this interview in this voice, it would sound a lot like this.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. And it's, it's just this thing I developed over time little by little.
And I love that. I love that so much guy.
No one ever told me that it's just like personal improvement on a very, what turned out to be large stage.
Yeah. And I just love that because a lot of people like, well, I'm not good at X.
It's like, yeah, guess what?
And neither was I go back and watch my first video.
Right? Yeah. And it's like the Super Mario effect where it's like, no one ever picks up a video game and falls in the first pit and was like, I'm so ashamed.
I'm just not good at this.
They're like, no, I remember there's a pit there.
I need to come with a little more speed.
I need to jump a little earlier.
Right? And, and as a result, you get really good at this thing in a very short amount of time.
And guess what? It doesn't feel like learning.
When you sold the company to Morph, you were committing to like two and a half, three years.
And from what I get, I don't think that the T-shirt costume turned out to be like a big hit for them.
But, but meantime, you were still making YouTube videos and kind of starting to build a following.
Yeah. But then I guess while you were at Morph, you got an offer to work at Apple as a design engineer there.
How did, how did that come about?
My boss's boss from JPL called me up one day and said, hey, I'm building up a team here at Apple.
I think you'd be great on it.
So I was like, I still had a year left in my contract with Morph suits.
So I interviewed at Apple.
They liked me. So they bought me out of the contract.
But one of the stipulations was like, you can't make YouTube videos anymore.
Wow. Yeah. Wait, why, because they didn't want their, any reputational risk or there's just, there's just no upside for them, right?
Yeah. Of like, they don't need press.
Okay, good news, one of our, you know, employees made a video.
It's only downside and I accidentally, you know, blow up a Girl Scout van and then, you know, suddenly Apple engineer.
Hopefully not. There's just no upside for them.
So like you, oh yeah, you can't make YouTube videos.
And I was like, well, first of all, you guys asked me to work for you.
So I'm not coming if that's your thing.
And so they backed off and just said, fine, wait three months and just get a little land in the culture.
And I'm like, by the way, guys, I only have like 120,000 subscribers.
I don't get that many views per video.
So just relax. I'm not that big of a deal.
99% of people at that point would have been like, well, it's Apple and the most desirable, one of the most desirable tech companies to work for.
Okay, I'll do what you say.
I won't make videos anymore.
But you were willing to like not work there to continue to make videos.
It'd been four and a half years of me making videos.
I'd built up this channel, right?
And by the way, like I really enjoyed it.
And I also had done a few brand deals at that point.
Right. So you had a little business going at that time.
Yeah, a little business.
It was a small little business.
But when you said, I really want to do this, their response was okay.
I mean, this guy, this who was building this team clearly went to bat free.
He wanted you there. He did.
Yeah. So he was, so he or somebody on the team was like, okay, we'll let you do this.
Just wait three months.
Yeah. And then the first video I made with mega viral.
When we come back in just a moment, if you've ever wanted to jump into a swimming pool full of Jell-O, well, Mark will tell you exactly how that is done.
Stay with us. I'm Guy Razz.
And you're listening to how I built this.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Razz. So it's 2015 and just three months after Mark starts working for Apple, he has his first viral video and you really have to see it to fully appreciate it.
Basically, he's sitting down with a group of kids with a watermelon on a table in front of them and then Mark slides off two halves of the watermelon rind to reveal a perfect red oval of watermelon flesh.
Oh my gosh. You want to know how I did it?
How? And of course, the trick is you just have two watermelons that are about the same size.
You cut one in half, carve it out, and the other one, you just slice off all the rind and polish it down with a brillo pad.
Yeah. Now you can put it back together.
And you blow people's mind at the party.
And that video actually, because I had my niece and nephews in that and I was kind of pranking them to see how they were like, what?
It was the first of many times that I would prank them.
But Jimmy Kimmel saw that video.
He sent me the email a couple months back and he said, hey, this guy could be a good recurring guest.
And he never does that. Usually it comes from the producers.
Yeah. And Jimmy Kimmel says, come on my show, come on his nut this night, which is Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Jimmy Kimmel Live, yeah, and he invites you onto the show.
Yeah. And then there I asked permission because it's like, and it went all the way up to, I won't name his name because you know his name.
He was a senior VP at Apple and he said, we should be focused on making great products.
That was his answer. And it actually had the opposite effect because it emboldened me.
I'm like, aha. He in writing is not willing to say no, which means he can't say no.
So I just did it and that was a very good decision in hindsight.
But meantime, you're still doing videos.
And tell me about like internally at Apple because I've been there and it's an amazing, incredible company, but it's a very secretive siloed organization.
People don't know what other people, like husbands and wives don't necessarily know what they're working on if they're both working at Apple.
So how did people start to react?
Yeah. I started getting street cred around Apple and people thought it was cool and people quite a few levels above me in the food chain would call me into their office just to chat and I was like, okay.
People just started to recognize me on the street.
So it started to be a thing where it's like, all right, there may be something here.
At this point, maybe I had like, I don't know, a million subscribers maybe.
And 2017, you made a video that is now famous for people who know your work.
It's a dart, you engineered a dart board that would move to where you threw the dart and you could essentially hit a bullseye every time.
How did people internally at Apple start to respond to you?
Because this is really when YouTube starts to turn.
You start to see YouTube celebrities emerge.
Yeah. And that deal, that one specifically I think was a brand deal for like $40,000, which to me was like really big money, like to make that much money on a brand deal.
So I started to make more money on YouTube than I was at Apple for starters.
And they, that money find presumably financed that creating that dart board because I think you spent three years trying to build a dart board that would move to wherever you threw the dart.
So it required a lot of really complex technology and money to do it.
Well, but like the money was like, again, the trick is like find existing technologies and synergize them in a way to make the whole...
Just off the shelf stuff and then connect.
Yeah. So we use Vicon motion capture systems.
And that right there is like 90% of the problem.
Once you can track this dart, which retroreflectors through the air, then honestly it's from a bird's eye view, it's simply Y equals MX plus B.
From a side view, it's simple parabolic motion and you're just solving for the XY coordinates of the board.
Now, obviously that's an oversimplification, but not by that much.
So then it's just a matter of just putting it together with some code and MATLAB and building the hardware for it.
And you would do this like in your garage.
Yeah. And also I would work with buddies too.
Like that one specifically was a guy named John who I knew he had very specific experience with that.
So we'd kind of work together, but I started to get to a point where like he would be turning the bolts and that's how I could work my full-time job.
How do you... I mean, any business starts out with an idea, right?
And multiple ideas and eventually there's an idea that lands.
How were you getting ideas for what to do?
Like the dartboard one, for example.
Did it just pop into your head?
Yeah. I don't have a great answer to this.
I get this question a lot, but it's like the ideas part of the...
is the part I find easy. And I think the answer is like my brain is just never turned off.
Yeah. It's just always a conversation I could be having and I start spacing out and then people are like, oh, you're probably...
You want to do a video on that.
I was like, of course, that's so good.
So I've always had about a year's worth of video ideas out in front of me as a runway, including now.
All of... we're working on videos that we will release a year from now, 12 of them.
So tell me about your...
just your life. Because this was not...
Like even at this point, you were not building a business.
You were an Apple employee, right?
Yeah. At a certain point, right?
You're watching your subscribers go up.
You hit 2 million subscribers in your mind.
Do you remember thinking, maybe at a certain point, I need to just focus on this full time?
One of my... I mean, I had a few fears, a big fear.
Like I said, I'm a fan of the side hustle.
Yeah. So a big fear is like as soon as this is my real job, does it suck the passion out of it?
And is it then I feel pressure to do this as opposed to like I get to do this on my free time because I love it, right?
Another fear was that it would just feel very isolating because I had such good camaraderie with my team at Apple, same with at NASA.
I really like being around the people and is like, then is it just me surfing the web at home all day and it just feels...
And both of those turned out to be very unfounded.
At what point do you remember realizing that this could be a viable stream of...
This could support your life?
I think a big factor in the end is I ended up doing...
So I went on Jimmy Kimmel's show once, right?
And then they're like...
One of the producers was like, he likes you.
He really likes you. And I'm like, whatever, you say that to everyone.
And then by the fourth time I went on, I was like, I think he does like...
We're both kind of pranksters, right?
And eventually he was like, hey dude, I think we should do a TV show together and for Discovery Channel and we called it Revengeineers.
That was the moment where it was like, this is just a lot.
I'm going to have to take three months off to film.
He approached you to make a show while you were still working at Apple.
Yeah, yeah, I was still working at Apple.
And this was on the... I guess we should go into the stories on the strength of this famous Glitterbombs video you made, which was designed to take revenge on somebody who stole Amazon packages from your front door.
Yeah, someone came and stole a package from my porch and it just felt so powerless like all of us who've had that experience.
It's very familiar experience.
You just feel violated.
Police wouldn't do anything.
And then it's like, oh again, in the mind of you, I will always think of video ideas.
I was like, wait a second, I have the tools.
I have the motive. I have the glitter.
If anyone was going to make a revenge made package and over engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me.
So the idea was like, yeah, you make a package with four phones in it because they could record, they could upload footage to the cloud in case it got destroyed.
And then when they lift the lid, it sprays like a pound of the world's finest glitter and a cup at the top and then a bunch of fart spray.
But we keep repeating five sprays every 30 seconds until they throw the package out of their car or house before they realize there's four phones inside.
This increase... They would throw the box out because it was so disgusting and then you guys could retrieve the box.
Because you had GPS in there and then you could download the footage.
Exactly. He takes the package and gets it in his car and eventually makes it to this parking garage where this glorious sequence unfolds.
No way. Look at that dude.
Look at my car, dude. Everything.
That video really was what I guess triggers Jimmy Kimmel to say, hey, we got to do a TV show, a prank show, getting revenge on people who do bad things.
Yeah, they wanted me to come on the show for the fifth time.
I would do pranks you could do with junk line around your house.
And that's where he said, hey, why don't we take this even?
Let's not even do something for my show.
Let's do a TV show together.
Yeah. It's like, yeah, you engineer some way to get back at people who are violating social norms.
So you don't pick up your dog's poop.
We build an autonomous robot dog to fire that poop back at you.
Or you don't return your grocery cart at the grocery center.
Small social violations, but we have an army of robotic shopping carts that will chase you through the parking lot.
So let me ask you from just a personal perspective, because in 2019, I think you decide to leave Apple.
I think by that point you had like 10 million subscribers.
10 million subscribers.
And you were still an employee at Apple.
But I wonder whether, I mean, you had a personal life.
You've talked about your son on your channel and he was born with autism and presumably that required some stability for therapy and other things that were involved.
Was a part of you, I don't know, worried about leaving the stability of Apple?
And even though you had 10 million subscribers, it's a lot of people, but I don't know, was there any uncertainty like you thought, you know, this could just all dissolve one day?
Totally. But it was like, I've always been pretty conservative in my decision making and like we had enough runway and enough deals on the horizon that it's like, I know I would at least have a two or three year run at this.
And if it failed, like I could always go back and get another job, but I may not always have this opportunity in front of me.
You were doing up until this point, everything pretty much, I mean, you were having friends that would help you build things, but you were filming and editing and scripting everything yourself?
For the most part, yeah, that's true.
Why? I mean, a big part is like because I enjoyed it.
Yeah. And this is the problem a lot of YouTubers do where it's like, they see a little bit of success.
So it's like, well, what's the playbook say?
Okay, I need to hire a manager and I need to hire five editors and a video guy and a script guy and then, and then you're left to just being a manager of people.
And then they're surprised three years later when the contents changed because it's lost its heart, they hate it because they feel like they're just a manager and the money's not there because the public has seen that the content has changed.
Right? So I was just like, why would I give up the thing I loved?
Which is like to this day, I still write all the videos and I spend probably 60 hours in the edit and I'm never going to give that up.
Like why would I? I'm happy to not make, make fewer videos and do what I love than to just be a guy who just like manages a team.
So when you left Apple to go full time into YouTube, who is like doing business development, who was looking out for, I mean, at that point, did you sign with an agency?
Did you, because there's a lot of incoming emails and messages and you're also filming and writing scripts and editing, you couldn't possibly have done all that by yourself.
No, that's right. Like no full time employees, but like I had a management company who had been bringing me brand deals for five years and they were continuing to bring me brand deals, right?
And so they would just tell me, hey, you have to say this at the end of the video, okay?
And then the check would show up at my bank account.
And then eventually, I can't remember the exact year I hired my first employee.
Yeah. And I just help run errands and do little builds and help set up tech stuff and get the cameras rolling, you know, stand behind the cameras and help me get focused.
Just one person to do all that.
You basically were like, I don't want to manage people.
I want to just make stuff.
Yeah, that's right. And to this day, now we have like 60 employees and still only one person reports to me and everyone else reports to the other person.
Yeah. So you leave Apple, right?
And this is 2019. And you've already at this point, I mean, you've hit 10 million subscribers.
So you're at this point a big YouTuber.
When did you start to realize or I know you're just my kids.
And I think a lot of kids are part of your fan base, right?
By the way, do you think it's primarily kids?
I mean, the analytics on average, it's like a 23 year old is like my median watcher.
It's kind of tricky because some of those kids watch their parents accounts.
But I could just say when walking around, if you're under 30 years old, definitely more than 50% chance you know who I am.
If you're under 20 years old, it's probably 90%.
If you're over 35, it's like 10%.
And that's a function of do you have kids?
I'm curious about how you thought and think about what you represent.
Did you want and do you want your videos to be seen as educational as something that kids or even adults can learn from?
Are these basically physics videos?
I'd say what I am is like the gateway drug to like that aha moment.
Like that lovely feeling of just like learning something new and being like, that feels good.
I want more of that. So I think I hide the vegetables is what I like to say, right?
Where it's like you get, you learn about parabolas from an automatic bullseye dartboard, right?
And so it's like, there's the cool story.
It's the clickbait title and thumbnail to bring you in.
But once you're there, once you click on that video, the 15 ton Jell-O pool and you're in then you better believe I'm a sneak in a little chemistry on you.
And so that I just want to reach as many brains as possible with that message, which by the way, guy, you better not cut this out, but you do it too.
I would just like they learn something.
I don't realize they're learning something.
Thank you for that. You're talking about while in the world, my kids show.
Thank you for saying that.
That's what we try to do because every episode actually comes from a peer reviewed scientific journal article.
We just turn it into a cartoon for kids ears.
That's amazing. I'd love for you to walk me through all of the work that leads up to starting to put together, let's talk about, this is amazing because I don't know anybody who hasn't dreamed of jumping in a pool of Jell-O or hot fudge or like, I remember as a kid, we'd be in the pool and suddenly say, what would that be like to jump into a pool full of marshmallows or Jell-O?
And you, of course, did too and you decided to see if you could make this happen.
I'm thinking this is the world's first ever actual pool of Jell-O.
Oh, no problem. You just get a bunch of, like I think most people like you just get a bunch of Jell-O powder boxes and you just throw a bunch of water in there and while it may look simple, it's actually a very difficult engineering challenge to pull off.
So difficult and you're right.
That's everyone's intuition until you actually sit down and do the math and scale it out.
First of all, to make Jell-O, you have to boil it and then you have to cool it.
And the fridge, so 38 degrees basically.
Super easy to do on a stove top.
How do you boil and then refrigerate an entire pool?
This seemed like a very worthy engineering challenge.
So last year, Thanksgiving, my brother and I came up with a plan and then in the middle of winter, we started digging a hole in his backyard.
By the way, how many gallons was this swimming pool going to hold?
It was 15 tons of Jell-O.
I would say I forget the exact gallon size, but it's the size of a small pool, in-ground pool.
So first of all, how do we cool it?
Well, I was like, my brother lives in Utah.
We installed a thermometer and starting in January, we tracked the temperature in his backyard every night.
And then got actual gelatin from a cooking supply company.
And then we used potential energy because we'd boil them in these 55 gallon drums, open the spigot, it would drain into the pool.
So basically the idea was, let's just make this in layers.
We'll pump up the Jell-O mixture in layers and we'll do it at the right time at night so overnight it'll chill it.
We didn't want to waste actual food.
So this is just water and gelatin powder and food coloring, but there's no sugar.
I lost 10 pounds filming that video because I was so nervous and at that point, I couldn't fail on this video.
It had to work. It had to work because there was lots of videos online of Jell-O pool and then it's like, it never solidified, it's super unsatisfying and I have a reputation on my channel where it's like, I will deliver on what the thumbnail promises.
And so this one was very binary.
It either worked or it didn't.
You had to have that shot of somebody jumping onto the Jell-O and sort of like staying on the surface.
Yeah, the belly flop on the surface.
And we got it. And you got it.
What did it feel like, by the way?
Like swimming in snot. When you go in, it just like fills your nose and like to this day when I smell that smell, my brother still has some of the 55 gallon drums in his backyard.
And if I go by there, it's like 10% good memories, 90% like that was a rough week.
Because gelatin is basically pig bones.
So it can get stinky. It's not a great smell when it's burning.
Yeah. By the way, how much does a video like that cost, do you think, to make?
That one was maybe $80,000, I'd say.
I don't do most of my videos now are, they're almost never less than 100,000.
Sometimes there's much as 400,000.
I have one coming up at the end of this year that will be $4 million.
Right. These are massive productions now.
I mean, we'll get to that later.
But one of the things that happened to all of us, of course, was the pandemic.
And YouTubers in particular, our show too.
We were very lucky. We were well placed because all of a sudden you've got billions of people around the world stuck at home and you can capture their attention with videos and a lot of Instagrammers became famous and all of a sudden now kids aren't at school or they're, you know, and you kind of jumped into that fray.
I mean, you sort of kind of became a science teacher during that time in a more formal way.
It felt like I had a connection with a lot of these kids and it just felt like I just wanted to do something to give them some sense of like normalcy or something.
So I decided to live stream like some science classes once a week.
And we did it for like three months, but it was, that was the first domino in a series of dominoes that's led me to this position I'm in now, which is like starting a company that's doing very well, right, because it was my first, I've had this dream to be like a high school physics teacher and to teach science classes.
That was always my plan.
One day I would retire and just like do that as a volunteer.
Yeah. And so it was like my first chance to actually try this.
I read something that you said in 2021 where you were like, you know, I kind of see what I do as a business, but not really, you know, if I, if I saw it as a business, I'd have a bunch of people or like you did not tell me why you didn't see what you were doing as a business because now by 2021, I mean, just from YouTube ads alone, well, it's a YouTube ads and sponsorship.
I mean, you were bringing in a substantial amount of money.
I mean, millions of dollars a year.
Yeah. So did you see yourself more as like, I don't know, like an actor would see themselves or a performer rather than a somebody who was actually running a business?
I don't know. Business just sounds so boring guy.
Yeah. Like I didn't like, I just didn't want to frame it in my own head as that because now all of a sudden it's like, you got to talk about taxes and stuff.
I'm more like, I'm the guy who builds an obstacle course for squirrels in my backyard.
Right. Like just in my own head, it's helpful to frame it that way.
It takes the pressure off and going back like treating your life's challenges like video games, like when you call it a business, it feels less like a video game.
Right. Yeah. Like you've had people coming to you and maybe you probably still do today saying, Mark, I know how you can scale this thing.
You should have 50 channels and you should have like, you know, a bunch of different people who make videos and they're all under the Mark Rober this and that and have people come to you with those ideas.
Yes. All the time. I would always ask to be like, okay, okay, for what?
And then in the end, it's always so you can make more money and it's like, I have enough money.
And then why would I put myself under all this pressure?
It's like running on a treadmill is like, and I had a good jogging pace on my treadmill.
And sometimes what people do is they take on all these ideas and they're cranking the treadmill up through a sprinting speed and that's cool for a little bit.
And you're getting the dopamine hit and you're getting that reward for that.
But pretty soon the dopamine wears off, but you're still sprinting.
And that's like the definition of burnout when you're not getting that reward for the work you're putting in.
But I was very protective of my treadmill speed.
When we come back, my mark eventually decides to speed up the treadmill and sell subscription science boxes to kids.
Stay with us. I'm Guy Rhoz and you're listening to How I Built This.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Razz. So it's 2021 and Mark is getting more and more known as a YouTube personality, but he's about to add something new to the mix.
Subscription boxes for kids and a company to sell them.
Crunch labs. What was the sort of genesis of that?
Did you feel like, hey, I can actually create a product from what I'm already doing?
So there's two genesis from, in a sense.
One is Jimmy Kimmel and I did a live stream for my son to raise money for autism.
This is during COVID. This is, yeah, during COVID.
Yeah. And it was at three hours you guys did live stuff.
Yeah. A bunch of his A-list celebrity friends, a bunch of my YouTube friends, and we raised three and a half million dollars or something.
And that night afterwards at his house, he's like, you know, you really need to make something physical.
And I gave him the standard line, I give everyone where it's like, why?
So I can make more money.
I'm fine. He's like, no, not so you can make more money.
You could just reach more kids with your message.
And it's just a different experience to physically put something together to be in the trenches versus just passively watching a video.
So they're going to bed that night.
I was like, for the first time, I'm like, oh man, I think he's kind of right.
And then in conjunction with that, around the same time, I had created this class with monthly.com, it's now called studio, where I taught creative engineering.
And that did very well for them.
And I made a good cut of that.
And from that, the guy who founded it was, I told him I was thinking about doing this idea and I asked him if he thought it would be a good idea because he had all the analytics.
And he was like, I would pay you $50 million on the spot if you would just do what you're saying you would do and give me ownership.
And what were you saying?
What was your description to him?
What you were going to do?
I would just make monthly boxes where they're paired with the video where I could teach the science of the cool physics that's going on.
So kids would get this exclusive video.
First and foremost, it has to be fun.
And then beyond that, what's the physics with it?
And each one would be paired together with a lesson.
We talk about the Kwanzaa effect relative to this little mini-dislunch.
And that's when he's like $50 million right now, if you do this.
And I was like, okay, well, that's an interesting response.
But it confirmed that you're, it didn't, to be clear, it did not give you $50 million or finance it, but it was, it gave you the confidence that this actually could work.
Exactly, because he had just seen the data and how well my creative engineering class had done.
And ultimately what it comes down to is like, the best situation you could have for a product is when you have IP along with the product, right?
Disney does this very well.
They launched the movie Frozen, but you better believe there's a million Elsa dresses being manufactured in backpacks and stuff.
And basically what I had done is for over a decade, I'd been building this IP.
And so there was all this pent up demand for a product.
And so in June, 2021, the first step I did is I got a product designer I really respected.
So for about a year, we worked on the ideas and then in June, 2022, we hired a couple more people, someone to help with like logistics and buying and sourcing from China took about, I think $3 million in my own capital.
No investors, no nothing.
We had 30,000 subscriptions ready to go like 12 month boxes.
And we sold out in like five days.
So we were cash flow positive after like two days or three days.
And so this was entirely self-finding.
By this point, you had enough capital and enough cash to self-finance it.
Was a $3 million investment in this thing?
I mean, you've referred yourself as being conservative when you make business decisions, but did that feel scary?
Because it's still a lot of money.
Not really because it was a lot of money.
And I'm not sitting on like Scrooge McDuck piles of cash by any means.
That was a reasonable amount of my whole net worth for sure.
But I just knew we would make enough at least to break even.
I knew there was some demand there again from like the creative engineering class I did.
So I did not think we would sell out in like less than a week.
That's for sure. How did you...
So I'm wondering, you mentioned, oh, do I really want to do this and that and I get burned out?
And so, but now you were jumping into a business that requires a lot of attention and time.
And then videos, your videos are increasingly complex.
I can't imagine how much time just the filming of them and then you're still doing a lot of the editing.
So how were you able to kind of start to do both of those things and manage your time?
Just like I finally was able to hire people.
I had the resources to hire good people.
And eventually now we've got to the point where like I've hired the person to do the hiring.
But that's such a hard role to hire for, right?
Because it's like trying to land something on Mars.
If you're off by a half of a half of a degree, you're going to miss the planet by 5 million miles.
And at this point, Crunch Labs itself has about 50 employees and my YouTube channel maybe has 10 employees.
Wow. I mean, are they separate businesses or they're not the same business, right?
There may be like a superstructure, but are they separate PNLs and everything?
They're separate PNLs.
There's a lot of shared resources, obviously, but like at this point, the YouTube channel is just there to advertise for Crunch Labs.
I don't run it to make money.
I basically, because I don't make money from sponsorships anymore because I always just talk about Crunch Labs because I realized...
I see. It's a lot better for me to build up my own brand and IP.
It makes more financial sense.
So now, like for example, your latest video is testing if you can blow your own sale.
And it's amazing because there's a...
I feel like just for one shot, you went to like Keto Ecuador, like just for one...
Like you flew to... Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like...
No, you're right. I would never fake that.
My team was like, really?
Do we really need to go to Ecuador?
One stand up. I was like, wow.
But when you put a video like that out, like right now, this video has almost 25 million views.
And I'm sure it was expensive to make.
But does 25 million views, just the revenue that you get from YouTube on that, is that enough to pay for the cost of the video and your team?
No, but Crunch Labs pays me like a monthly fee to make the videos.
So it's built into our CAC, basically.
I am a sponsor. They sponsor my videos.
Right. Do you want to know how much I made on that video?
I'll tell you. Yeah. Let me just see.
That video has made me $67,000.
Testing if you can blow it on sale right now.
Is that a big number or a smaller video?
I thought it was a lot more.
25 million views and that video must have cost at least a few hundred thousand dollars.
Here's what I'll say though.
That's just that video.
Whenever you release a video, there's a knock on effect where then people will see a bunch of your back catalog.
So the amount I made the month that I released that is closer to like $300,000.
From YouTube videos. From YouTube videos.
So that revenue is closer to like, oh, that can keep the lights on and pay for this video, right?
Yeah. I mean, so essentially YouTube was the generator of income for so long.
You were able to make really good money from YouTube.
Now YouTube is really, it doesn't matter if you want it to break even at the very least.
You don't want to cost you money, but it's not that important that it makes a lot of money because it's a way for you to also talk about Crunch Lab, which is more important.
That's right. And just from a financial standpoint, you can make more with your own business than you can just making YouTube videos and taking sponsorships from like NordVPN.
And it's like more importantly, like my ethos on money hasn't changed, right?
Like I don't have five Lamborghinis and I ran a three bedroom town home.
So it's like we're taking that money and we're reinvesting it and doing some really cool things.
For example, for the classroom, all of the middle school science standards, we're making like a Mark Rover style video of those to teach them.
And we're going to have lessons plans with it for all these teachers and that's probably going to cost like $10 million and we're going to make it free for teachers.
Kind of like what Bill Nye did back in the day.
So we're kind of reinvesting the money into efforts like that.
And something like that becomes sort of sustainable or self financing because of what?
Because eventually they'll be ad revenue or people sort of discover Crunch Labs or I mean there has to be some way to pay for it.
I think it's more truthfully, we have not figured that out yet.
It feels like it's the right thing to do.
Certainly there's a brand awareness play that helps, but that's a gamble and it's a long term thing.
Our North Star here for everyone at Crunch Labs is to like reach as many brains as possible and to learn science and feel that it shouldn't be that intimidating.
And against that metric, this is such an obvious thing to do.
Maybe that sells more Crunch Labs subscriptions because kids know about it, but the plan is definitely not to like run ads for Nord VPN.
And like you mentioned Bill Nye earlier and he's obviously an important science communicator and it's been for a long time.
You're the boxes, right?
They're connected to the videos that you deliver with the boxes where people can watch how to make them and it's you, it's Mark Rober.
And so does that matter?
I mean, the business depends on you.
It depends on your name and your brand and your being in front of the camera.
And a lot of times, companies start to, one of the ways that they mature, grow, it's not always the best thing, but sometimes they have this conversation like, how do we survive without this person?
In your case, does it matter?
I mean, because you will always need to be the face of the brand.
I think yes and no, right?
Because some of this stuff is evergreen.
So like once we make our four years worth of build boxes, they're done.
The videos are done. If we do the videos for the classrooms, like once they're done, they're done and those can live on and hopefully still be relevant.
So yeah, physics doesn't really, the physics doesn't really change.
Yeah, gravity is always going to be 9.8 meters per second squared, at least for the foreseeable future.
But that's the nice thing about packaging up a video is like in this time that you and I have been talking, I am in just about a million homes, a million different views.
Of your 144 videos, one of the 144 videos.
That's right. So I think there's an element like once I get these done, then they can live on and be evergreen.
But I agree with you that like you see this as I feel like it's a downfall when they try and totally pivot the channel and have eight different people on camera.
People don't like it and it's not what they subscribed for, right?
It's not what they came for.
And I do feel at this point that it's like what I'm doing is working.
And so it's like nobody touched the controllers, nobody sneeze.
Let's just keep doing this until somehow people get sick of it.
Mark, when you think about the journey and like where you are now, I mean you were a life for a JPL, not that long ago.
And here you are, you're on every list of the 10 biggest, 10 most famous, whatever, YouTubers.
I mean, when you think about where you started and then where you are now, how much of what happened to you, tribute to the work you put in and the grind and how much you think has to do with just the luck of the timing and the people and circumstances.
My short answer to that, if you made me give it in half a sentence, is luck is so much about the right time and the right place.
I will say this, everything in life is a dice roll.
But what you can do is like stack the dice in your favor.
And so that's very much how I view my success.
I do put in a lot of work and I try hard.
But so if you put my same brain in a hundred different situations on this world, very, very, very few out of 10 million would end up in the position I'm in.
I keep thinking about how remarkable it is.
You mentioned that you made that video JPL, seven years working on it, you had a kid, your mom passed away.
I mean, particularly your mom, that happened before you became this giant YouTuber.
But I love that. Honestly, to me, it's like regardless of what you believe happens after we die, this idea that she had no idea because it's like she took being a mom, because she took being a mom like so seriously.
And so I love this idea that no one really knows the full ripple effect of the effect you'll have in a life because when she passed away, six months later is when I made my first YouTube video.
And so I think that's also sort of the lesson for my son is just like, I'm just sick.
Is like the measure of success.
The measure of success, it's did you leave the world a better place than you found it?
What is your net positive effect on the world?
And so by that measure of success, my son and his special needs buddies and like my mom are just like, you know, giants living amongst us mere mortals.
Yeah. To me, like I'm like following in their steps or at least trying to that's Mark Rober, YouTuber, engineer and founder of Crunch Labs.
By the way, how did you guys clean out that Jell-O pool?
Oh, this is a great. We called a porta potty company and had them come hose it out.
It's brilliant. They just sucked it all out and then wow.
We're literally like 200 bucks and then we just filled it back with dirt.
And that was it. This you just got to think creatively guy.
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