How Mark Rober hides "science vegetables" in viral videos (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Mark Rober: I love that aha moment where you learn something new, and to me that feels so good, and I feel like I'm like a gateway drug dealer of that feeling, especially to kids. 

[00:00:14] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective.

I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Mark Rober. After nearly a decade as a NASA engineer working on the Mars Rover curiosity team, Mark is now the most followed science YouTuber in the world. He has over 58 million subscribers and 8 billion views. Mark's projects have captured the imaginations of viewers around the world.

There's the time he set a record for building the world's largest Nerf gun. Or when he created an obstacle course in his backyard to protect his bird feeder from squirrels. Or how, to deter porch pirates from stealing his packages, he baited them with glitter bombs that explode when packages are open and catch the thief red-handed on camera.

[00:01:08] Mark Rober: That's what's so cool about being engineers, like if something doesn't exist, you can just freaking will it into existence. Like what a superpower, right? 

[00:01:19] Adam Grant: Along with his prolific YouTube career, Mark is the founder of Crunch Labs, a monthly STEM subscription box that teaches kids to think, build, play, and solve like an engineer.

Today, Mark and I are talking about the joy and wonder of learning, and teaching too.

[00:01:39] Mark Rober: I feel like I know you pretty well, Adam. 

[00:01:42] Adam Grant: We've met one time. Come on. 

[00:01:44] Mark Rober: No, but like I, I know you para socially before that and when I met you, it lined up very well with my sort of parasocial version of you. So that's why I have high degree of confidence this isn't gonna be some gotcha interview. 

[00:01:57] Adam Grant: What, what was your perception of me and what did I do to validate it?

[00:02:00] Mark Rober: Just like a very curious individual, not afraid to say what they wanna say, but just like a good human who likes connecting people. I was like, I bet if I meet this guy in real life, this is how he'll be. And guilty as charged. 

[00:02:14] Adam Grant: Well, thank you. You, you definitely are exactly who you claim to be. 

[00:02:18] Mark Rober: Mm. I like hearing that. I think that matters on YouTube, like authenticity is the currency of YouTube. The relationship with the audience is different and they want real people, and they want just people being who they are. Like, you can fake it for a little bit, but you can't keep that up for years and years, and so it, it eventually falls down.

[00:02:37] Adam Grant: I think the first taste I got of that was when you posted your MIT commencement speech and you recorded your own intro of it, talking to the audience, and my first reaction was why? Like, just start with a speech, that's your content. And then it hit me. No, you have a relationship with your audience who is not the MIT crowd, and you're gonna speak to them before you show them the speech you gave to another group of people.

[00:03:01] Mark Rober: Plus you need a a banger intro, Adam, as we say in the industry, you gotta hook 'em. You gotta tell 'em like why it's worth staying before you just get into a boring speech.

[00:03:11] Adam Grant: I think that that's fair, but on the other hand, some people would say, make the beginning of the speech the banger, no?

[00:03:16] Mark Rober: YouTube is a different medium, right? They expect more at the beginning of a video, so it's different than a speech. Like at the end of the day, words are just words and you sitting there talking is just you sitting there talking. Look, hey, don't mow my grass here, Adam, right? I'm the YouTube guy. All right? You'll give me YouTube. I'll trust you on speaking and writing books. This is my area of expertise. 

[00:03:39] Adam Grant: Damn right. It is, and part of what I wanna do today is, is learn from it. But I, I feel like we need to start at the beginning. Like, I, I wanna know what your childhood was like. Were you constantly getting in trouble building things that exploded? 

[00:03:52] Mark Rober: I, I think I, I was raised in a household that really encouraged exploration and creativity.

Like my mom especially really valued that. I remember once. I was six years old helping prepare dinner, and my mom asked me to cut onions and I was like, started crying, you know, like you do. And then I ran upstairs and got like our swim goggles under the sink and I came back down and like, now that's like an understood life hack, but back then, you know, there was no Reddit.

I didn't, I didn't see this anywhere. So this was like a novel way of approaching this problem. And I just remember her response was like, so positive and she just loved it. She, you know, she even took a picture that means it's an important moment 'cause you only have so many pictures back in the day, right? That was like a, a seminal moment. I remember that so well. And I kind of feel like I'm doing that still today as like, hey, I have this other cool idea I really love, I wanna put this out into the world and I want to share it with other people and get feedback and then make it better. 

[00:04:51] Adam Grant: You're the, the center of a Venn diagram of an engineer, a gamer, and a prankster.

[00:04:57] Mark Rober: Mm, definitely prankster has always been, I mean, I, to this day and like, I'm sort of not proud to admit this, but I sort of am, even like if I'm around my niece or nephews, just tapping someone on the opposite shoulder and, and getting them to look the other way is so juvenile and just so dumb. But I get a hit of dopamine to my brain.

If I can pull it off, right? This is why when someone steals a package from my porch and you just feel violated and you're like, man, what the heck? And the package that was stolen was like a $3 cheap something from Amazon. But then you're like, you know what? If anyone's gonna do something about this, like I worked at NASA on the Mars Rover for 10 years.

I have a master's in mechanical engineering. Let's get these punks back for the sake of humanity. So then it leads to building a glitter bomb. A package basically that gets stolen when it gets open, sprays a pound of the world's finest glitter, an uncharitable amount of fart spray. Records it on four phones, uploads it to the cloud for the enjoyment of all of YouTube and that series of glitter bombs, right?

Each year we would like level up. How cra how much crazier we could make the engineering at. It led us to India. We shut down like three scam call centers after like hacking their CCTVs. And that series I think has like, uh, like 750 million views. So, and it's just this idea of just like, it's almost Batman esque.

Like getting back at these punks with just engineering and a bright spotlight. 

[00:06:27] Adam Grant: It's the ultimate revenge of the nerds, I think. 

[00:06:30] Mark Rober: Yes. 

[00:06:32] Adam Grant: Where do these ideas take shape? 

[00:06:34] Mark Rober: I've never really sat down and had a brainstorm. Let's come up with ideas. I did like a squirrel obstacle course in my backyard, and it's like, okay. What would be really hilarious? How about like engineer versus squirrel and they have to pass through this eight part obstacle course to earn the seed, right? So many of the videos just come from my daily lived life, but just thinking like an engineer is, is seeing the opportunities as they come to you in real life for making some really engaging content that can get people, especially kids, stoked about science and engineering and building and creating. Especially with 3D printers and CAD and all the electronics, like the cost of doing so many things have come down since even when I was a kid. There's tutorials on so many things online, so there's never been a better chance to just kind of put your creative fingerprints on the world than right now. 

[00:07:27] Adam Grant: At some level, like this is, this is the promise of being an engineer, but it's sometimes also blocked by an engineering mindset. I was actually just with a group of leaders of an organization that's almost entirely run by engineers. One of those.

[00:07:41] Mark Rober: Say it, who is it? Name drop. 

[00:07:42] Adam Grant: One of those big tech companies that I can't name, but you, you are familiar with them and you've used a lot of their products.

You didn't work there. They feel like. There is a constant knee jerk reaction among their engineers of, but that's not the way we've always done it. And like I think about your nine years at NASA, the Curiosity Rover is amazing. And I want to talk to you about, you know, what you learned from, from building it, but also like why did no one at NASA think to build a reusable rocket until Elon came along?

Like, why are we blowing this up every time we build it? I guess what I'm curious about is, is it the kind of people that are attracted to engineering who sometimes go into that like close-minded, I'm gonna criticize or prosecute anybody who challenges my thinking mode? Or is there something about engineering training that sometimes creates these, these mental obstacles and entrenches people cognitively. 

[00:08:35] Mark Rober: You know this, you have three kids, they come pre-programmed.

So there's something about people's brains, even if you raise them the same way. The output is different. Same input, different output. Right? So my guess is like engineers and people who think that way are sort of attracted to that line of work where there's one right answer, it's black and white. I, I make these videos, but of course the comment section is always like, well actually if you, you is a double dual amplifier on that, you know?

And I'm like, okay, okay. Yes, I realized there might have been like a 2% more optimal way to do this thing, right? But even at NASA, even when I worked, at Apple, I think my way of thinking as an engineer admittedly was maybe a little bit more rare, where this kind of the art with the engineering together is like a great super power, right?

Engineers love to optimize any problem, but so often it's the wrong problem to even be optimizing. Imagine a topographical landscape and there's like mountains and hills and engineers will very often get caught in this trap where they're, they're optimizing a local maxima, so they're, they're just getting to the top of this hill.

But if you zoom out, you realize there's seven more mountains that are much bigger. So I think a lot of it is just like., This idea of zooming out, attacking it from first principles and just being bold enough, that's bold and you will get pushback. Right? But it's. Not an easy path to get there. If you're not hearing a lot of people saying, this is stupid, this is the wrong way, then you're not being bold enough and you're just gonna end up in the same spot.

[00:10:10] Adam Grant: And of course, what's tricky about that is sometimes people say your idea is stupid and they're right. But you get all this positive reinforcement over time of people told me this was never gonna work and I proved them wrong. And therefore that means that whenever people tell me something is not gonna work, I'm right and they're wrong.

[00:10:28] Mark Rober: But I think there is something to be said, I think with these big leaders where their crystal balls just like a little bit clearer than the rest of ours, and I think that helps them be confident. I think sometimes that clairvoyance helps you like really push and be confident in your decision. 

[00:10:46] Adam Grant: I think that clairvoyance only works though when you're in a system that has linear rules, right?

The laws of physics are sort of immutable, last time I checked, right.? The social, the laws of human behavior change constantly. One of the fears I have with people who are really great at engineering is they, they are working from a set of fixed premises. I think when it comes to how our world is governed and how people interact and how people learn and access information, we don't have the same fixed principles, and so it's a lot harder than to trust the image in your crystal ball.

[00:11:22] Mark Rober: Fair enough. Human behavior is much more complicated, but a reusable rocket to your point is not, and that's physics and that's first principles back of the napkin math being like, why the hell are we doing it this way? We should be doing it this other way. 

[00:11:38] Adam Grant: Talk to me a little bit about your time at NASA. I'm, I'm really curious, no pun intended to hear about what you learned from working on Curiosity. 

[00:11:46] Mark Rober: I was a fairly young engineer, but they assigned me like a chunk of the rover. Like I was responsible for the, the jet pack that lowers it to the ground. I worked on that for about three years, and then I worked on some hardware on the top deck of the rover that like accepted a sample of dirt from the arm.

I know that hardware better than anyone else on this planet or Mars. I know that hardware intimately because it was on my shoulders to work. Thankfully, it is still working now on Mars a decade later. But it's like this idea of giving people responsibility. Now we had reviews. We had like gray beards.

You know, you'd have these people who had a lot of experience who I would present my design to, and they'd tell me the 45 reasons why it's terrible and it's gonna fail the way I've designed it. And I'm like, okay, good point. You go back and you fix it. Um, but ultimately that hardware was mine and I was the one who was expected to have sleepless nights worrying about it.

And I did. And because of that and that feeling of ownership, you don't mess around and you really take it seriously. You know, I have 80 employees now and this is something I've really internalized that. It's like give people ownership, let them feel the weight of it and support them and check in with them, but don't micromanage them.

I think you steal so much of their potential brain power by dealing with it in that way. 

[00:13:11] Adam Grant: So in the organizational psychology world, what you're describing, it's usually called task identity, which is the sense that you're working on a whole identifiable project from start to finish and you own it. And that gives you a sense of responsibility.

It leads you to develop new skills. It boosts your confidence, it leads to, you know, all kinds of creative problem solving and, and risk taking efforts. I love the way that you not only had that, right, but now you're creating it for kids. 

[00:13:37] Mark Rober: Yeah. And I, I think it just leads to a better outcome, right? We have like 15 product designers and they're each in charge of one of these toys, right?

And they cycle through and I'll come in on Saturday. They're here in part because, you know, they really wanna deliver something good, but they love it and they're feeling the ownership and it's exciting, right? So it's like, it's almost like a carrot versus the stick approach. I'm just such a firm believer from my own experience.

[00:14:01] Adam Grant: Well, I think of a lot of your work as a, a giant Trojan horse, right? That you, you have these sensational videos like, I'm gonna watch a squirrel have to navigate a maze in order to get the, the food out of the bird feeder. Or I'm gonna wonder like what would happen if you built the world's largest jello pool.

But what I'm really getting is a cool science lesson in the middle of that. 

[00:14:23] Mark Rober: I like to say like hiding the vegetables, right? And that's what we're doing, right? You get that clickbait title, you know, 15 ton jello pool. But then pretty soon you're learning about chemistry and the scientific method without realizing it.

Right? Between my channel and Crunch Labs getting like 500 million views a month. Which is bonkers, right? And people and kids are choosing to watch that. No one is forcing them. This isn't like they're in class and they're wheeling out the cart. And they're choosing to watch science content and then choosing to watch more of it.

And so I feel like it's just like my North Star at this point is just reaching as many brains as possible with this thing, that like, thinking critically, that's one of the real lessons we're teaching, right? You want critical thinkers in society. You want people who think like engineers. Even if you end up being a vet or a firefighter.

It means, you know, failure's part of the process and that you should test hypotheses and see what works and what doesn't. If you see a news article, maybe you question the source, right? These are all like a way of thinking that no matter what you do, I think is beneficial for society and it's just a lovely way to live life.

[00:15:28] Adam Grant: I will say, the thing that surprised me most about your videos over the years is how long they are. 

[00:15:35] Mark Rober: Mm. 

[00:15:35] Adam Grant: Like, like we're in a world where, where everything is getting shorter, and every time I hear that, I think of a recent meta-analysis. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna nerd out on this one for a second. Uh, this is, this is a, a synthesis of 179 studies across 32 countries looking at concentration tests that are given to people starting in 1990, all the way to 2021.

[00:15:57] Mark Rober: Hmm. 

[00:15:58] Adam Grant: And it turns out that adults have gotten better over time and kids have not gotten worse. 

[00:16:06] Mark Rober: Really? That's fascinating. 

[00:16:08] Adam Grant: I think I, I, I mean it's so interesting, right? That this is not an ability issue. I think it's a motivation issue. And it's a shiny object problem in some ways that of course, we're distracted when there are lots of distractions in our environment, but we're fully capable of focusing on something that piques our interest.

And I think your videos are living proof of this. You go 15, 20, sometimes 30 minutes. Talk to me about how you keep attention in a distracted world. 

[00:16:32] Mark Rober: People know the difference between steak and popcorn, right? Like. Sometimes you want popcorn, but you very rarely feel good about that choice afterwards, right? But steak is like nourishing and you remember that and you can crave steak 'cause you're just like, I'm just in a mood for something hearty. What I try and deliver is steak. And people remember that. And you know, sometimes you're just sick of popcorn and you want something nourishing. And part of making it nourishing is storytelling.

And it's hard to tell a full story in one to two minutes. In my opinion, like. I'm an okay engineer. There's lots of way, way smarter, better, more capable engineers out there. I do feel like I'm a pretty damn good storyteller, and I think that's, uh, something people don't realize is what's actually happening.

I still write every single one of my videos and it's a laborious, time consuming process that uses a lot of my brain power, like that is a skill that I've, I hopefully have gotten better and better over time.

[00:17:29] Adam Grant: I think this speaks to one of the, the most complicated dynamics of creative work, which is for all the complaints that we can register about social media, we are tremendously fortunate to live in a time where you can build a platform and then know whatever you create is going to reach a critical mass of people to give it a real chance of taking off. But a lot of people starting out their careers or starting out creative projects, they don't have the platform and it's a huge investment of time and energy to say, okay, I'm gonna write this whole story. I'm gonna make this long video. I'm gonna put it out there, and it might be crickets in response.

What advice do you give to people for starting on that journey? 

[00:18:08] Mark Rober: There's a lot of good reasons to start a YouTube channel or social platform. There's two bad reasons, and that's to get rich and famous. Right? When I started doing these videos in 2011, no one knew you could even make money off these platforms.

I did it 'cause I loved sharing these ideas, right? And it felt really cool. If you put it out there in its crickets, go back and watch my first videos. This is what I love about anyone on like, YouTube is like, it was so cringey, it was so bad. I love that you can see the growth process over time and you know how I've evolved, right?

So my advice is like, do 50 videos and don't expect anybody to see any of them. You need to have intrinsic reasons for doing it, besides being rich and famous, because it's a lottery and it's really, really hard to do, especially now, but it's possible. But just have realistic expectations of what success is.

[00:19:01] Adam Grant: You reminded me of a, a Duncan Watts study of music markets where he wanted to see what makes songs popular. You had to hit a certain quality bar to have a chance. And once you cleared that bar, like if you could sing, if you had a catchy melody, then essentially the only thing that really mattered was how many times your song got played.

And if you got early exposure, then it, you got the earworm, it got stuck in your, in people's heads and, and it would take off. And I, I think that that really underscores your point, that like this is a lottery at, at some fundamental level.

[00:19:34] Mark Rober: The way I view life as like everything is a dice roll, but I try and stack the dice in my favor, right?

Basically my criteria is just like. I want you to have never seen anything like what the video is coming from me before. In order for something to be remarkable, it has to be like able to be remarked about. To make a video go viral, you just have to have a visceral reaction, and generally that visceral reaction comes a lot from novelty. It has to make you feel something. You have to feel amazed. You have to feel like empowered. Feel anger, you know, that's a trick that's being used a lot today. You just have to feel something. No one shares a video they didn't finish watching. This is why a lot of times it's like world's largest snuf gun, world's largest super soaker.

So it's just like bonkers things you've never seen that stretch your brain that are wrapped in a story. And for me that's so creatively fulfilling because I can make a video about bedbugs. 'cause I've always been fascinated by them and we could still pull 40 million views on it. 

[00:20:31] Adam Grant: Well, the, the fact that, that you're delivering the most important vegetables of our time, like understanding how to think like a scientist and be a critical thinker. To me, like the, that end justifies the means. I do worry though that like we're creating a culture that's increasingly sensationalized, that like expectations are skyrocketing for like how interesting content has to be to capture my attention. Does that land us in a world where the only way you can pique people's interest is with hyperbole is one concern I have.

And then the, the other concern is, is it harder now to get people to pay attention to a story that might not hit those extreme emotional notes, but really matters? How do you think about the impact of, I guess, YouTube culture on what we pay attention to? 

[00:21:19] Mark Rober: I don't make the rules. I just play by them. Like, I wanna reach as many brains as possible, so this is the way I need to do it right now. You can only learn so much by passively watching a YouTube video. When you get in the trenches and you're actually doing something, which is a big reason why we started Crunch Labs. So you get these boxes come into your door every month, and they're fun toys, right?

It's a really fun toy. And then that's the number one criteria. Like the first one's this really cool mini disc launcher that shoots six rapid fire discs. But we learn about flywheels because in the middle, you know, there's a flywheel that's spinning it. So you know, they get into the trenches. They're actually building with their hands as they're watching a video for me of how to put it together, but also learning the principles behind it.

And you know, the side of the box says, think like an engineer. And we really do get so much feedback from parents that like, more than anything, this has just changed the way my kid sees the world and sees themselves in the world. So it's just, it feels so freaking good to see that. 

[00:22:16] Adam Grant: This, this goes to something else I wanted to talk about, which is going to Mars.

There's a, a fair amount of debate about whether we should be spending all the resources that the American government pours into NASA to be thinking about setting foot on a planet that you can't breathe on. That takes forever to get to. That's way too cold. Like, does this make any sense? I think for the average person, the case is you go to Mars and all of a sudden that

just captures the imagination of a whole new generation. The same way that the moon landing, like just, I think sparked a generation of scientists and engineers and kids who wanted to be astronauts. And I think creating that curiosity, that hope, that optimism, that sense of possibility is, is to me one of the more compelling reasons to go.

Where do you come down on this, having, having worked on one of the, the early technologies that will make it possible for us to go to Mars? Like, why should we go?

[00:23:14] Mark Rober: I think it's deeper than what you said of just like creating hope. It's like. This is in our DNA, dude. This is how our brains work. We moved from the caves to the farms, to the cities.

We are explorers. Naturally, like boundaries don't hold us in. We went to Venus and we explored Venus, and they basically have runaway global warming. Understanding Venus, you know, helps us understand us. Like that's a big part of it is like by looking outward and exploring the solar system and understanding it, we understand our own history book and therefore we can plot, here's where we were, here's where we are, here's where we're going.

[00:23:52] Adam Grant: Let's go to a lightning round. Okay. Tell me what the worst advice you've ever gotten is. 

[00:23:57] Mark Rober: My dad told me I needed to get serious and stop pranking people as a kid. He said, at some point you're gonna have to get serious about life, Mark. And it's worked out okay for me. I think it's, he's a great dad, by the way.

He gives very solid advice, but he was off on that one. 

[00:24:14] Adam Grant: Missed the Mark there. No pun intended. Best advice. 

[00:24:18] Mark Rober: You're not as good as you think you are, and you're also not as bad as you think you are. There's a regression to the mean. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Don't get cocky, but don't be so sad when you screw up.

[00:24:28] Adam Grant: Seems like a healthy outlook. Do you have an unpopular opinion you love to defend or a hot take that you can't resist putting out there? 

[00:24:39] Mark Rober: Uh, give you a second. 'cause I have a lot of these. I feel like I'll say this. And I know I've personally messaged you about this, your hot take on like astrology and like this is so dumb.

Like there's no evidence at all for it. I used to defend that and just be totally in your camp. And by the way, I still do, but I've kind of changed my opinion and, and my hot take now is like, it's a beautiful framework for a lot of people. It's a form of a religion, but there's no oppression and it really stretches people to be, to be a better version of themselves. 

[00:25:15] Adam Grant: Wow. Okay. I have to fight with you on this a little bit. 

[00:25:18] Mark Rober: Fight, fight me. 

[00:25:20] Adam Grant: I think astrology is not a victimless crime. Uh, I think that in part because there is an MIT led paper by Jackson Lou on discrimination and stereotyping. Where if you are a Virgo in China, people are less likely to hire you and they're less interested in dating you because the Chinese character for Virgo was translated basically to what sounds like an old spinster.

And people think like super disagreeable, unpleasant, fussy, ornery. And people do this all the time. We see it in America too. Like you people will ask me what my sign is and then wanna judge me based on that, and I'm like, nope. 

[00:26:01] Mark Rober: I completely agree with you on this point. Like everything, moderation and all things, it's the aspect of making you a better person in that framework that matters.

I'll take it another step further. When you get a reading and they tell you something about your future, that that then changes how you live through your life? That's where it's like, clearly I draw the line, but there's an innocuous level I think that I used to not have tolerance for that. I now do, and think of it as like a beautiful thing.

[00:26:29] Adam Grant: I, I guess I could come around to the idea that if, if people are just kind of using it for fun and it's helping them. It's helping them either think about what matters to them in life or broaden their decision making from the narrow frames that we often get stuck in. Like, yeah, there are a lot of tools that can help with that.

I'm open to the possibility that having a framework, even if it's a bad framework, can be helpful for people. You're already hearing my inner prosecutor come out. However, my other worry about astrology is that it can be a, a gateway drug to a failure of the very critical thinking that you stand for. So there's, I don't know if this is causal, but I've read now many rigorous studies showing that people who believe in astrology are more likely to believe that the moon landing was faked.

They are more likely to believe that vaccines are a massive net negative for human health. They're more likely to believe that, um, 9 11 was an inside job perpetuated by the US government. And I do think that there's, there's an element of accepting things at face value, um, that do not have valid evidence behind them

that can make it easier then for people to start buying into other things that are obviously not true. And I worry a lot about that. 

[00:27:52] Mark Rober: But like, I think a lot of people have made the argument that like religion is a very similar, like what is, where do you draw the line between people who are very good people and religious?

Who, and astrology is the same meta-analysis, point out the same, right? Correlation? 

[00:28:10] Adam Grant: Maybe. You're right, believing too strongly in anything can, can lead to these sorts of effects. The difference is that you can't falsify religion. Right? Like what, whatever deity you believe in, I cannot run any randomized controlled trials or longitudinal studies to prove to you that your beliefs are not real.

Whereas with astrology, right, there is a literal zero correlation between either your Zodiac sign and any of your personality traits. Um, we can also, like, we can listen carefully to astrophysicists who tell us that there's no way that either through, um, you know, through gravity or through light, that other planets and stars can have any impact on your psyche.

And we just start to rule out all the ways that the stuff that's happening in the solar system could possibly affect what's going on inside your brain. And at that point, why are you still clinging to this made up framework? 

[00:29:02] Mark Rober: There are certain aspects of certain religions that you can disprove, like that's not true for all religions. Like there's certain claims that can be disproved, but it doesn't change people's minds. Like you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. 

[00:29:17] Adam Grant: Oh, good point. 

[00:29:18] Mark Rober: Like my mom converted and became religious and it improved her life so much. And I think she was a better human. She raised better kids because of this framework she had.

And I think a lot of people wanna throw the baby out with the bath water and be like, but, but it's not true. And it's like, okay. But like, if it has a net positive effect, and again, you don't take it too far where you're discriminating against other people and making it worse. You know, I don't know. I don't know Adam.

[00:29:45] Adam Grant: No, I'm, look, I'm, I'm receptive to that point of view. I, I don't have anything against organized religion, especially if, if the religion is teaching values that we can agree are, you know, are character strengths and virtues and not encouraging people to discriminate or to cause harm and in the name of a God.

I, I just think it's dangerous to hold positions that you didn't reason, your reason, your way into to begin with. I think that you shouldn't have faith in something that you can't prove. You should believe that it's possible, but not that it's certain. 

[00:30:15] Mark Rober: Are there any beliefs you hold, I'm gonna turn this on you, that you think you hold, that you didn't reason yourself into? Are you that much of a logic bully? 

[00:30:23] Adam Grant: I hope, hope I want you to find one, actually. 

[00:30:25] Mark Rober: I, this is my new thing. I'm gonna be thinking about this all day, and I'm gonna text you and be like, I got it. 

[00:30:30] Adam Grant: I, I like, there's maybe a basic one, which is like, I, I believe that human beings are more good than bad. Um, but I'm also not that attached to that belief. And if somebody could prove it wrong, like, okay, well then let's figure out how to design a world that brings out more of Lincoln's better angels and fewer of the demons. 

[00:30:51] Mark Rober: And by the way, confirmation bias is a real thing, and we generally tend to think of it in a negative way. But if your general premise is that humans are good and people are trying to do the right thing, guess what? You find evidence of that in real life and you just feel better and more optimistic because you're looking for that and you're grateful for it because that's what you expect, and then therefore that's what you get. You and I have very similar brains, but I have found over time my pendulum swinging back to like, let there be a little bit of magic in life.

Bill Burr has a thing. He's like, you're gonna be fine. You're gonna be fine. Don't worry. And if you're not gonna be fine, you might as well just be fine until you're not, and then worry about it when it happens, right? It's like, I love that. 

[00:31:33] Adam Grant: There, there is some research to back up your point of view. I, I really like the work that Jared Clifton and his colleagues have done on, on what they call primals, which are the, the core beliefs we have about the world that we live in.

And one of their findings across a series of studies is that people believe the world is generally a good and safe place, they end up with better mental health and they also achieve higher success. Um, because like so much of assuming the worst can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, you'll find it or you'll, you'll elicit it is the other risk.

[00:32:05] Mark Rober: Oh, that's, yeah, that's true. I mean, Gottman studied this with marriages and like the number one predictor of divorce is contempt. Meaning, if you hear the door slam, you assume you're, ah, my partner did this because he's just a terrible person, or she's a bad person. 

[00:32:20] Adam Grant: Look at you quoting psychology. From, from past guests. And I don't, I don't see any reason, by the way that you can't teach those beliefs and, and say at the same time, look, the fact that in general the world is a safe and good place doesn't mean that bad things don't happen and you won't meet bad people and there aren't dangerous places and cities and moments, right?

So like you can believe in the good and still guard against the bad, I think is, is a reasonable premise. What's a question you have for me? 

[00:32:47] Mark Rober: What is something recently in your life that you have, have, have been forced to rethink? Like how often do you practice this? Let's hear it from the author himself.

[00:32:57] Adam Grant: Well, you, you were, you were actually there for a rethinking moment in real time. So we, we were at an event last weekend and our oldest daughter, Joanna, came and there was a parenting session. And the, one of the moderators put her on the spot. She was at the time, the, the only kid in the room and basically asked, what do you think?

Like, what do you think that, you know, the parents in the room could do better? 

[00:33:23] Mark Rober: And, which is an incredible setup, by the way. And she handled it like an absolute legend. 

[00:33:29] Adam Grant: I was so proud of her that I, I had to say, what, what do I do now? Do I take notes or do I leave the room? And Joanna said something to the effect of, she said, one of the things we're working on

is that when she brings up a problem or a frustration or a complaint, I immediately try to solve it. And sometimes she just wants sympathy or validation or, you know, a chance to be heard. And I. I have been working on this for a long time and just consistently failing on it, and I think that the reason that I've been failing on it for a long time is like what I now understand.

I've just projected my own idiosyncrasy onto other people. Like I don't tell people problems unless I want their help solving them. 

[00:34:15] Mark Rober: In another life, you would make such a great engineer. You know, it's just like, I think you might have missed your true calling. 

[00:34:22] Adam Grant: Realizing that most people actually like are just looking for support.

One of my mentors used to say is sympathy not solutions. And I think it's, it's a good mantra to remember. 

[00:34:32] Mark Rober: And do you, so how does this look like in practice now? 

[00:34:34] Adam Grant: We actually, we were given a phrase via a psychologist who's listening to that conversation who said. Why don't you ask, are you looking for a tissue box, a soapbox or a toolbox?

As a parent, I, I'd be curious to hear your take on this as also a, a parent with, you have a teenager as well, right? Yes. An 18-year-old. 

[00:34:53] Mark Rober: Yep. 

[00:34:54] Adam Grant: So I, I had a lot of debates with, with people when, especially when our kids were younger, about like, what's the right balance between demanding and supportive? And sometimes I worried that we were too supportive. Um, you know, like Allison and I would sit down at, at dinner and ask our kids how we could be better parents. . And I remember a colleague of mine saying, are you insane? Like a generation ago, like you, you, it's, it's not your job to be a better parent.

It's the kid's job to be a better kid. And. I guess I've wondered about that. And in that moment where Joanna had the courage and the comfort to say in front of a room of adults, here's what my dad needs to get better at. It made me think that no, we were not listening too much to our kids. We were not creating too much psychological safety, uh, because we built a relationship where they can tell us what they really think.

And so I guess I felt in her telling me my failures, I felt successful. 

[00:35:51] Mark Rober: It was a beautiful thing to see that. And you know, I might've saw like one or two beads of sweat pop out on your forehead when she was given the floor of all your peers to say what kind of dad you are. My son is, he's autistic, so he's on the autism spectrum, which it just brings up a really good point, like for his mom and for me, like we've never shed a single tear about that.

Like, 'cause at the end of the day. You just want your kids to be happy. And the beautiful thing about my son is I know exactly what he needs to be happy, and it's a simple life. You know, he loves his friends, he loves his family. He's 18 years old, and we get into pajamas and we still do the same nighttime bedtime routine with stuffed animals.

One of the best parts and most rewarding parts of being a parent, like we got to stretch that out for a really long time. So he knows we have YouTube friends, which means when we're out in public and people come up and want a picture, he is like, oh, that was a YouTube friend. And when he meets up he's like, what's your name?

What's your name? What's your name? Does your house have stares? What's your favorite color? But beyond that, he doesn't really understand what I do. And I love that, like the value I provide to him is I do awesome voices for stuffed animals. You know, I've given, I give great piggyback rides and back scratches, and I'm a good tandem bike rider.

And that's a, I just think it's so beautiful. 

[00:37:14] Adam Grant: That is really sweet. I love that. So how are you gonna turn our household upside down during the holiday season? 

[00:37:23] Mark Rober: Oh, okay. Something I'm insanely excited about. For the past three and a half years and working on a project, we built a satellite, just me and my team, just a bunch of normal old civilians that's going to space.

It's launching in January on a Falcon nine. And the sole purpose of the satellite is to travel five miles a second above the earth. It has a screen and a camera on it. You could upload your picture to the satellite and then you could get your picture in space, a selfie with the earth photo bombing you.

And it gets even better because if you tell me your zip code or your city when you upload it, we'll wait to take the picture till we're over your house. So you could technically be in the picture twice 'cause we'll tell you exactly where we're gonna take the picture. And of course, that is free if you're a Crunch Lab subscriber, and of course you could just sign up and get it now, grow your brain in amazing ways.

And if you're not, all you gotta do is sponsor one box for a kid who can't afford it. So this amazing, this I, you know, those billionaires want to charge you $30 million to go up and get your picture space. We're basically doing it for free. And this is another example of like, man, I would've loved this as a kid, right?

Just like an actual selfie in space, you're going to be in space. I'm really, really excited to tell the world about that. 

[00:38:40] Adam Grant: Thank you, Mark. So fun. 

[00:38:42] Mark Rober: Great to be here, Adam.

[00:38:47] Adam Grant: I had an aha moment when I was talking to Mark when he said, you can't reason people out of positions that they didn't reason themselves into. I realized I'm not practicing something I teach. I think about the Mayo and Olson work on values and beliefs as cultural truisms that a lot of times people just accept things at face value because they sound right.

And if you just ask people, how did you arrive at that view? Sometimes they end up rethinking it or the more recent evidence on what's called the illusion of explanatory depth, where if you just ask people, well, how does that work? Sometimes they discover that they can't reason their way through it, and then they become a little bit less attached to the preconceptions that they hold.

And so I think this is a reminder for me that I need to make fewer arguments and ask more thoughtful questions.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, the show is part of the Ted Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

[00:40:17] Mark Rober: I need you to fall in love with Fat Gus and go on the journey of realizing as I'm calling this dude squirrel fat over and over, that if when I finally see she has nipples, only pregnant female squirrels have visible nipples. And now what an uncomfortable realization that was for me. And then I the mea culpa of like, I'm so sorry.

You look beautiful. Not a pound, not a gram. Over 700 grams, Fat Gus, it looks great on you. I plugged in. Nate, don't use your AirPods. You're screwing everything up. Alright. 

[00:40:53] Adam Grant: This is our Easter egg. 

[00:40:54] Mark Rober: Please cut that out. 

[00:40:56] Adam Grant: Oh, we're, we're definitely playing that at the end. Um, that's, it's perfect.