YouTube creator; owner, CrunchLabs
FOR ENGINEERING A GOOD TIME
PICTURE THE COOLEST, MOST RIDICULOUSLY awesome room you can imagine. Maybe it’s got a golf simulator and a billiards table, or radiant-heat floors, or polychromatic India Mahdavi furniture, or meticulously cultivated hygge. Whatever it is, whatever you’re envisioning, it would be even better if it had a secret door leading to another room.
And of course, a secret door has to reveal itself in some sick way, like how you run through a wall to get to track 9³⁄₄, or wade through a coat closet to get to Narnia, or turn a bronze eagle on a bookshelf, or push the correct button on a soda machine. It can’t just be a switch labeled SECRET DOOR, though that’d be kind of funny. That kind of meta humor would be very on-brand for Mark Rober, except that Rober would rig it so that when you flip that switch, you’d get hit with a glitter bomb. Roughly 60 million people watch Rober’s monthly videos, though, and every single one would sniff out the trap. A dedicated fan already would’ve guessed, would’ve assumed, that there is a secret door somewhere in this room, and they might’ve even worked out where it is and how to activate it. Rober, however, possesses two magical powers beyond science and engineering—a frictionless access to his boyhood mind, and the instincts of a born storyteller—and that is what enables him to conceive of something we can’t, something even cooler than a room with a secret door.
A second secret door.
Rober is 42 years old, and he has a graduate degree in mechanical engineering from USC. He worked at NASA for nine years, seven of them on the Mars Curiosity project, and then another five at Apple on advanced VR for autonomous vehicles before quitting to be a full-time YouTube creator, and he and his wife have a 15-year-old son, all of which seems impossible because Rober himself seems 15. The decal T-shirts, the backward baseball caps. Everything is or . He does that millennial entrepreneur thing where he ends every sentence with the same rhetorical question, right? He grew up in Southern California, just inside the northern border of Orange County, the
