YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Rober

lines on the record: 92
first: 2024-04-15
most recent: 2024-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I love that. Honestly, like to me. It's like regardless of what you believe happens after we die, like this idea that she had no idea. It's like she took being a mom like. She took being a mom like so serious. 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, when I made my first YouTube video. And so I think that's also sort of the lesson for my son is just like, Just Like the measure of success The measure of success, it's did you leave the world a better place than you found it? Like, what is your, 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. Just Giants living amongst us mere mortals. To me, like.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I keep thinking about how remarkable it is. You mentioned that video at JPL seven years working on it. You had a kid. Your mom passed away. Particularly your mom, that happened before you became... This giant YouTuber”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short answer to that if you made me give it in half a sentence is luck, it's so much about the right time in the right place. I will say this, everything in life is a dice roll. But what you can do is 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, you know, very, very, very few out of 10 million would end up in the position I'm in.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the 144 videos. That's right. 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 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 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It's like in this time that you and I have been talking, I am in just about a million homes, a million different views.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think yes and no, right? Because some of the stuff is evergreen. So 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 yes.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a gamble and it's a long term thing. 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. Against that metric, this is such an obvious thing to do. Maybe that sells more crunch lab subscriptions because kids know about it. The plan is definitely not to run ads for NordVPN.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 townhome. 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 were 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. We're going to make it free for teachers”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 catalog. So the amount I made. Month that I released that is closer to like $300,000.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but Crunch Labs pays me like a monthly fee to make the videos. Okay. So it's built into our CAC. Basically, I am a sponsor. They sponsor my videos Do you want to know how much I made on that video? I'll tell you. That video has made me 67,000.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're separate PNLs. There's a lot of shared resources, obviously, but 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 five million miles. And at this point, Crench Labs itself has about 50 employees on my YouTube channel maybe has 10 employees.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really because it was a lot of money, and I'm not sitting on 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, you know? I knew there was some demand there again from 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 two days or three days.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 launch 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 Koanda effect relative to this little mini dislaunch. And that's when he's like 50 million dollars right now. If you do this, and I was like, okay, well, that's an interesting response.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they're going to bed that night. I was like, for the first time, I'm like, 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It's just a different experience to physically put something together to be in the trenches versus just passively watching a video.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's two genesis from it, in a sense. One is Jimmy Kimmel and I did a live stream for my son to raise money for autism.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in the end, it's always so you can make more money. And it's like I have enough money. So why would I put myself under all this pressure? It's like running on a treadmill. And I had a good jogging pace on my treadmill. Sometimes what people do is they take on all these ideas and they're cranking the treadmill up to 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. 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. So I was very protective of my treadmill speed.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know business just sounds so boring, guy. Yeah, I 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?”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I 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 that was the first domino in a series of dominoes that 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. It was like my first chance to actually try this.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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... 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 you kind of jumped into that fray. I mean, you sort of became a science teacher during that time in a more formal way.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One was maybe $80,000. I'd say, I don't do most of my videos now. Almost never less than a hundred thousand. Sometimes there's much as 400,000. I have one coming up at the end of this year that will be. Million dollars”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like swimming in snot, you go in, it just like fills your nose 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 because there's lots of videos online of Jell Opool 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was 15 tons of jell-O would say, I forget the exact gallon size, but it's the size of like 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 use potential energy because we boil them in these 55 gallon drums, open the spigot, it would drain into the pool.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super easy to do on a stovetop. How do you boil and then refrigerate an entire pool? This seemed like a very worthy engineering challenge, so last year at 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Jello, you have to boil it, and then you have to... Basically, cool”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say what I am is like the gateway drug to that aha moment like that lovely feeling of just like learning something new and being like that feels good I want more of that right 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 of the 15 ton jello pool and you're in, then you better believe I'm gonna sneak in a little chemistry on you. And so 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 Just like they learn something, they don't realize they're learning something.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 through 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?”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. To this day, now we have 60 employees and still only one person reports to me and everyone else reports to the other person.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's right. Like, no full time employees, but I had a management company who'd 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. Somebody just helped 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years later, when the contents change 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 fewer videos and do what I love than to just be a guy who just like manages a team.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the most part, yeah, that's true. I mean, a big part is because I enjoyed it. This is a 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 you're left just being a manager of people. And then they're surprised.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Therapy and other things that were involved. Was a part of you, I don't know, worried about leaving the stability of Apple. I mean, even though 10 million subscribers is 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?”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they wanted me to come on the show for the fifth time I would do pranks you could do with like junk lying around your house and he's like that's where he said like hey why don't we take this even let's not even do something for my show let's do a TV show together 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 like an autonomous robot dog to like fire that poop back at you. Or you don't return your grocery card at the grocery center, you know, small social violations, but we have an army of robotic shopping carts that will like chase you through the parking lot.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guys could retrieve the box Exactly. He takes the package and gets in his car and eventually makes it to this parking garage where this glorious sequence unfolds.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 frame, I'll always do a 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 bait 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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a big factor in the end is I ended up doing so I went on Jimmy Kimmel's show once, right? Yep. And then they're like he. Of the producers, like, he kind of likes you, like, he really likes you. And I'm like, whatever. You say that to everyone. And then by like the fourth time I went on, I was like, he does like me. 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 like Reveners. That was like the moment where it was like, this is just a lot. I'm going to have to take three months off to film.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my, I mean, I had a few fears, a big fear. Like I said, I'm a fan of the side hustle. So, like a big fear is 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 be 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 it's like, then is it just me surfing the web at home all day? And it just feels... Both of those turned out to be like very unfounded.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, I don't have a grad answer to this. I get this question a lot, but it's like the ideas part of the part I find easy. And I think the answer is like, my brain is just never turned off. You're just always a conversation I could be having. I start spacing out, and then people are like, Oh, 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. We're working on videos that we will release a year from now. 12 of them.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that right there is like 90% of the problem. Once you can track the start with retro reflectors through the air, then honestly, from a bird's eye view, it's simply y equals mx plus b. From a side view, it's a 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 together with some code in MATLAB and building the hardware for it.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But like the money was again, the trick is find existing technologies and synergize them in a way to make the whole shelf.”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Merge. 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”
2024-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CrunchLabs: Mark Rober · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT