A Positive Message From Youtuber, Mark Rober

A positive message from Youtuber Mark Rober set the class of 2023 at MIT forward, to changing the world.

My grandson, Jacob, introduced me to Youtuber Mark Rober four or five years ago. Since then, I have become a Mark Rober aficionado. This young man has shown the world how to play with elephant toothpaste. Set up squirrel mazes in his backyard and made me laugh over his Christmas present to porch pirates. I cried as he bore his soul over his autistic son.

Mark Rober is an American engineer, inventor, and YouTuber known for his creative and educational videos. He gained popularity for his work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he contributed to the design and development of the Curiosity rover for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

After leaving NASA, Mark Rober started his YouTube channel, which focuses on creating entertaining and informative videos that blend science, engineering, and storytelling. His videos often feature unique inventions, DIY projects, and creative solutions to various challenges. Some of his most popular videos include building a giant Nerf gun, creating a squirrel obstacle course, and designing a glitter bomb to catch package thieves.

Mark Rober’s channel has amassed millions of subscribers and his videos have garnered billions of views. He has been praised for his ability to make complex scientific concepts accessible and entertaining to a wide audience.

At MIT, Mark Rober tells graduates to throw themselves into the unknown and advises the Class of 2023 to embrace optimism and collaboration.

Mark Rober is generally regarded as a positive and likable figure. He has gained a significant following on YouTube due to his entertaining and educational content, which is often focused on promoting curiosity, problem-solving, and learning.

Mark Rober is known for his enthusiasm, creativity, and passion for science and engineering. He often uses his platform to inspire and engage viewers, especially younger audiences, in topics related to technology, physics, and innovation. Many people appreciate his ability to make complex concepts accessible and engaging, as well as his commitment to promoting scientific literacy.

Additionally, Mark Rober has used his platform for philanthropic efforts. For example, he organized a campaign to raise money for the charity organization Team Trees, with the goal of planting 20 million trees worldwide.

He urged MIT’s graduating class to cultivate a sense of optimism and collaboration, and, in our uncertain world, to “pick what you think is the best path and just move forward.”

Rober’s first item of change,  was to “embrace naive optimism” to avoid excessive doubt and discouragement.

“It’s easier to be optimistic about your future opportunities when you’re sort of naive about what lies ahead,” Rober said, using the challenge of graduating from MIT as one example. “If you truly understood what would be required, that discouragement might have prevented you from starting.” He added that such an attitude can also aid a big life decision. “When you feel like you want to know the results before you decide, but the true outcome is simply unknowable.”

Instead, Rober suggested, “Life is like trying to cross a big flowing river with lots of rocks and boulders strewn about.” We must negotiate things one rock or boulder at a time, he emphasized, remarking that “the willingness to jump from my current safe rock to the next is what I feel has led me from college to NASA to YouTube to eventually landing on this rock, of giving the commencement speech at M-I- freaking-T. There’s no way I could have predicted that path when I was exactly in your shoes 20 years ago.”

At the 2023 OneMIT Commencement ceremony, engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober urged MIT’s graduating class to cultivate a sense of optimism and collaboration.
Image: Gretchen Ertl

As a second nugget of advice, Rober advised graduates to “frame your failures” in order to learn from them without being too stressed by them — as one might in a casual setting like video gaming, where people are unselfconsciously motivated to improve.

“I feel like when you frame a challenge or a learning process in this way, you actually want to do it,” Rober said. “If you want to cross the river of life, you’re gonna get wet, you’re gonna have to backtrack, and that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.”

Thirdly, Rober advised the graduates, “foster your relationships. A sad truth about getting older is, life gets busier and busier and it gets harder and harder to make really close friends like you made here in school.”

We have evolved as cooperative creatures, he noted, and should “positively apply confirmation bias to [our] relationships. If you assume good intentions on the part of your friends and family, and you tell you

Quotes from Youtube video and news article from MIT News.

Rober is an engineer by training who worked for NASA for almost a decade and was part of the team that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012. He has also worked for Apple. Even as his engineering career was flourishing, Rober began making videos exploring science and engineering, and in 2011 established his YouTube channel, which now has over 24 million subscribers. Rober’s videos span an array of topics from his NASA work to squirrel behavior, toothpaste explosions, shark activity, the properties of Jell-O, and much, much more.