Chapter 1: What was Mark Rober's experience working on the Mars Rover?
I never knew that you worked on the Mars Rover for NASA. That's so fucking cool.
Well, what's really wild is my name, Mark Rober, is only two letters off from Mars Rover. If you change the K to a S and the B to a V. And honestly- It was meant to be. It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. It's just one day I'm like, oh, dang. What did you do? So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I got my bachelor's and master's in that. And I worked on-
The rover that's on Mars for like seven years. So the way it works is they just throw you into the deep end. And like, I'm, I was responsible for a chunk of the rover. And so, you know, I designed what it should look like. I, you know, you test it, you integrate it, you put it together, you have a team of people working with you.
They have graybeards, they call them at NASA, who look at your design and tell you all the reasons it sucks. So you go back and change it.
This sounds like some Gandalf the White, like you need to go and pay homage to the dude at the top of the mountain.
That's effectively what it is. But they're smart. They know what they're doing. They've put stuff in space before. And so they give it to the young folks who are just coming up. And literally, I was in charge of a trunk on the top of the rover. The arm go digs in the dirt, takes that sample, puts it into the belly of the rover, and like... I designed the hardware to accept that.
And it's still working, fingers crossed, on Mars. That's still going. Yeah. Which is wild when you look up at the sky, you know. All the stars look the same. Mars has a little bit of red tint to it, right? You know where your baby is. Yeah, and it's like, that's 90 million miles away. And I've touched something that's rolling around on that dot in the sky.
And what's really cool is on Earth, things oxidize and break down. So they crumble and go away, right? So... let's say, you know, thanks to AI or whatever you want to say, a million years from now, our species is done. There won't be any, if you came here, you would just see nature. Like at that point, everything's broken down and crumbled and rusted and gone away.
So the aliens would come and they just see this lush planet. And then they'd go to Mars and be like, what the hell are these? Because on Mars, there's no oxygen. And stuff doesn't break down. So a million years from now, those rovers are going to be sitting there. Your shit's going to still be there. And it's like, where the hell did this come from?
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Chapter 2: What lessons does Mark Rober share about curiosity in adulthood?
I mean, Messi's coming down and it goes in, right? I don't understand why they haven't just attacked that aspect of it. But, like, live sports seems like a great first place to start. I'm very non-conspiratorial.
That's a...
like my tendency i tend to believe the like mainstream to a degree same skeptical of most people but do you okay so what is your opinion on conspiracy theorists like why why do why do they exist like what is uh my opinion on conspiracy theorists i think that they're exciting
Like the theories are exciting. It's a much more exciting way to think about the world. A big part of it is this idea called compensatory control. So if you get people to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they're more likely to see patterns in random meaningless static. The same thing happened, I think, during COVID. Before there was enough evidence to know that the lab leak was legitimate,
Uh, a lot of people hooked into that because it's way easier to think that this global pandemic is because of some malign scientist than the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. If it's up to chance, what control do I have over this? But if I can personify it, so it's myth, it's archetype, right? It's mythology. It's like a personification. There's good and there's bad and there's evil.
And, ooh, I could have, I think a lot of it is to do with control. So like having a reason.
If the Illuminati exists and is running everything, it's a nice model that just explains everything. Absolutely. Yeah.
I mean, it's not everything. I'm sure there's a million reasons. I've had some really great guys on that...
that do uh uh conspirituality uh derek beres from that uh podcast was real interesting they know they wrote a book about the psychology of conspiracism but i'm uh i'm kind of fascinated by it um even though i'm not i get to watch it it's like i don't know someone else loving a sport and you not being a fan of it yeah it's kind of interesting to watch this what do you think what's your perspective on conspiracy theorists i think
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Chapter 3: How does failure shape Mark Rober's engineering philosophy?
What is that? You think you're just, you lose the anonymity and you like, you see the human in front of you. Oh, that's a good point. Do you know what I mean? Like if someone cuts you off and you're waiting in a queue and you're like, oh, excuse me. Oh, it's okay. Like you're a lot more patient than in a car. You're like, I'm going to kill your family.
Yeah, I'll fucking shoot you. Well, a few things there. First off, humans still have not fully gotten used to being in a three-ton missile that moves at multiples of the speed that we ever have before. I'm a very comfortable driver. I'm sure you are too. Yeah, yeah. we're still very maladapted to doing that at that speed.
And when you're in a car, you're kind of in a bubble and it feels like nothing, you're standing still and the rest of the world's moving past you. And then when something happens, you're kind of reminded of the precariousness. So that's one part of it.
I think another part of it is the reason that we have anger, the reason that it's adaptive is that before laws, I needed to have a way to say to you, you've crossed a line. Yeah. You have encroached on some sort of boundary that you shouldn't do. And my response to you is going to shock you into not doing it again. Right. The, um, externality of somebody cutting in front of you in line is not
great, but usually not life and death. The difference, kinetically, it's way more dangerous. The final thing is that when somebody cuts in front of you in line, if they turn around and notice and they see you, almost nobody has an issue.
You have to be a real dick for somebody to cut in front of you, not knowing you were there or making some sort of a mistake, I didn't realize you were waiting, and for you to still have a problem after they've said sorry and then stood behind you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the same isn't true when driving. Yeah. If someone flashes their hazards, you're still pissed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It helps.
I mean, if someone does this, you're like, okay, but still, you suck, you know? Exactly. There's a little bit of you in the back of your mind that's like, oh, I'm going to keep an eye on that guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably right. There's something about the disconnection, the anonymity. Because you see this online too, where there isn't the danger of driving a kinetic missile, where we're a lot quicker to make judgments if it's just some anonymous name and you're commenting anonymously.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of robotics in manufacturing?
Like, to get a maid to come around is maybe, even for a good-sized home, 200 bucks. Okay, so you can get them every other week. Yeah. And you still have 100 bucks to save on this thing. Robot-a-ketamine.
Yeah, the addressable market seems very small versus, hey, I'm going to make a robot that can wheel around your factory floor. It is, by the way, its torso can stretch eight feet to screw in that thing and then come down. Like, make a specialized robot for that factory.
Still kind of probably looks like a human, but give it six arms because all its job is to drill in the six bolts on the bottom, right? Mm-hmm. And then make those robots, like that immediately will have a massive ROA for a company that has money to pay for it, right? I saw a new type of warehouse robot.
So instead of warehouses being built upward, this begins the warehouse high and builds it low. So all of these things run over the top of like tubules that come down. So imagine that you've got your warehouse and you don't stack shit from the bottom up. You have the robots running over the top and they... get stuff, bring it up to the top.
And then they run around here with like a little grid formation and below each grid. So not only does it restock stuff, it also then goes and pulls it out. And, um, it was some absurd space saving efficiency. This, this warehouse is eight times denser than a normal one because everything is just packed side by side.
You don't need any space to run between the stock because the stock is the floor, the whole floor stock.
Oh, wild. I see. Yeah, I think the winner of the robotics, the first big winner takes all. The NVIDIA of the robotics will be ones who address factories first. And then there'll be knock-on effects. They'll bootstrap it from there. Then how do you perfect that for the home? Not the other way. I'm surprised we're starting with the home.
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Chapter 5: How does Mark Rober explain his Glitter Bomb project?
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That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. I guess it's just a sexy idea. It's a cool, it's attention-grabbing. But yeah, total addressable market is just, it's not there. Okay, for anyone who hasn't seen your Glitter Bombs series, please explain that.
Well, like a lot of my ideas, people are like, where do you come up with your ideas? And it's like... I don't know. Like my brain's just always on in the sense of like thinking of like, oh, that's a good idea. Right. And so someone sold a package for my porch and I felt really sad. Have you had a package stolen for your porch? No. Well, actually maybe, but I haven't known.
It's very, it's an American thing. Apparently, apparently this doesn't happen a lot in other countries. But you do really feel violated. And this was like a $3, I don't even know what it was, something from Amazon. It doesn't matter, right? And at first, the police obviously won't do anything about it. But then I was like, you know what? Like I don't build the Mars Rover for heaven's sakes.
Like I could probably do something about this. So I designed a bait package basically that had four phones in it that I could track the phone so I knew where the package went. But they were also recording so it could upload that footage to the cloud. So even if they destroyed the package, I would have footage of the theft.
But more importantly, when you lift it off the lid, it had a cup that used centrifugal force to spray like a pound of the world's finest glitter. And then to make sure we got the package back after like two minutes, he'd spray just an uncharitable amount of fart spray. So they were incentivized. And then I played fake police chatter like, you know, we have a report of like, you know.
And so we always got the packages back, sometimes in better shape than others. And I don't know. I think it was – it just really struck a chord for a lot of people who have had the same thing. To make a viral video – You just have to evoke a visceral response. Like that is the key to making a, that is, that is the key. Like if you want to know how to, that's it.
So you have to feel vindicated. It has to make you feel, it has to be funny, has to make you feel angry. That's a trick that's used a lot these days and making people angry to get them to share. And so this one just, it checked a lot of those visceral response buttons. Mm-hmm.
And yeah, and so I did it for like, each year I would improve and go, eventually we had drones that came out and sprayed the glitter in the house, you know, and they opened the lid. Each year I would like, as an engineering challenge, how can I take this to the next level?
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Chapter 6: What lessons can be learned from Mark's approach to failure?
And also, this is a crazy fact, probably about half the people's faces are blurred. Half of them aren't. And people are like, well, how do you make that decision? If you're not blurred, you signed a release. which means they were willing to let me put their face on every single criminal whose face isn't blurred in the glitter bomb. Where did the release form go to?
I gave it to them because I would like know the houses, right? They took it to their house. So we would knock on the door and be like, okay, we gotcha. Are you cool if we show you in a YouTube video? And you might be like, well, why would they agree to this? And you just have to offer them
the correct compensation which in most cases was like a starbucks gift card you're kidding no you you got people to admit to having their face on one of the biggest youtube channels in the world as a criminal yeah by offering them a starbucks like by the way like a ten dollar starbucks gift card this wasn't like 200 wow but it's just what you'd find is just like We value our reputation a lot.
And you think other people have the same frameworks and think like you. But some of them are like, hell yeah. Like, let's do this.
Well, I mean, you thought that you were going to get a parcel. You didn't. You got sprayed and fart sprayed. now you go to Starbucks, you know, it's kind of the stars land in the clouds and in Starbucks. Uh, yeah. I mean, that's one of my favorite series that you've done. I thought it was so great. And I, another one, your, um, like scam phone call. Yeah.
A broad taking advantage of old people thing. Um, The relationship that you have with technology, you're obviously very pro-technology, it's something that is your love, it's something that you're working on, you're trying to encourage other people to do their own. Have you got, when you see things like that, when you see phone centers that are trying to scam old people out of money,
Does that become conflicted for what technology sort of enables for you?
I mean, at the end of the day, I think technology is amoral. And it can be used for tremendous good. It can be used for tremendous bad. And, oh, you hope the good outweighs the bad. And my job, you know, is to use some of the good to try and outweigh the bad. And in that case...
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Chapter 7: How does curiosity play a role in learning and creativity?
Literally that video was born. I was making one of the glitter bombs and I got one of those like Microsoft scam calls, you know, or like your car warranties expired. I'm like, who's behind these things? So eventually I worked with another YouTuber, Jim Browning. We hacked into some of these scam centers in Kolkata, India. So we got access to their system.
How did you access the security system?
So their trick is that when they come to take over your computer, so you pretend you're an old, you know, some, I don't know what's going on. And they're like, okay, ma'am, let me help you with your computer. Well, that's a two-way connection. So when that happens, if you know what you're doing, you can remote into their computers. So that's what Jim Browning does. He's very good at computers.
And you don't just get access to their CTV. You get access to like their mainframe. So we know exactly. It's kind of a normal business, by the way. It's kind of boring. They have like scam training. They have like HR, right?
Yeah.
They have, like, goals of how many scams you're going to do a month, like pizza parties.
I was going to say, you know what's happening for lunch that week?
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of hilarious. But we'd see how much, you know, they're making, I think, like $30 million a year running three shifts 24 hours a day. They'd been doing it for a decade, three of these. So we went there with, you know, our glitter bombs.
First of all, I hired, like, eight people to work undercover for eight months just to learn, just to, like, find out what the week would be. To work there? At a scam center, yeah. I wanted to learn their weaknesses. And one of them, it turns out, is you can bring lunch boxes out onto the floor.
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