Jay Shetty & Mark Rober ON How to Turn Ideas into Reality

Have you ever wondered if the secret to your greatest success is actually hidden within your most embarrassing failures?

In this On Purpose episode, Jay Shetty sat down with Mark Rober, a former NASA and Apple engineer, inventor, and educator who has become one of the most influential creative minds on the internet. With over 70 million subscribers, he has redefined educational entertainment by blending high-level engineering with a sense of childlike wonder. He revealed the secrets behind his success and shared strategies to cultivate a life of creativity, resilience, and meaningful impact.

Celebrating the Child's Curiosity

Rober shared with Jay Shetty that his mother had the biggest influence on his life and supported his creativity and inquisitive mind since an early age. She encouraged him to think outside the box from an early age. At five, when she asked him to cut onions for a salad, he started crying from the fumes. So, he ran upstairs, grabbed his swim goggles, and continued chopping onions. His mother was impressed by his creativity and celebrated him for it.

Rober told Jay Shetty that he grew up in an environment where he was celebrated rather than punished for taking apart the remote control, and that his upbringing laid the foundation for his entire career. It allowed him to view the world as a series of problems waiting for creative solutions. He is forever grateful for his mother's love and support, as they were the foundation of his work, which eventually touched millions of children and inspired them to be curious about the world.

Touching Mars

After graduation, Mark Rober became a NASA engineer. He described his interview at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as an intense, hour-long grilling on a whiteboard. The real test was how he acted under pressure rather than the equation he was asked to solve. To him, the experience at JPL was similar to a college campus, where people exchanged ideas freely, and everyone was focused on testing limits through iterations; they even broke things to see what worked and what didn't.

Rober worked for NASA for a decade, including seven years working on the Mars Curiosity Rover. He designed hardware that is currently sitting on the surface of Mars, 90 million miles away. Rober told Jay Shetty that it's an indescribable feeling to look up at a reddish dot in the sky and know that he touched something on that planet.

Life is Like a Game of Super Mario

To Mark Rober, thinking like an engineer means not being afraid of failures; it's important to acknowledge that failure is a necessary part of the process. He explained to Jay Shetty that an engineer's goal is often to break things during tests, to understand their limits. He believes that, if you don't break anything, then you aren't really testing.

This philosophy applies equally to life. Rober told Jay Shetty that adults often internalize failure after a mistake, feeling like one themselves. On the other hand, toddlers and engineers treat failure as a lesson in what not to do next time and move on; they don't worry about looking dumb in front of others when something doesn't work out. Rober believes that you must leave your ego aside and turn fear into curiosity because this is the mindset of the people who put a rover on Mars.

To Rober, resilience is like playing Super Mario – you don't feel embarrassed or consider yourself a bad person when you fall into a pit. Instead, you're excited to try again using the knowledge you gained by failing, such as jumping sooner or running a little faster. He told Jay Shetty that life should be framed as a game because each time we fail, we, in fact, learn a new skill for future endeavors. He believes that, if you focus on the end goal, such as rescuing the princess in Super Mario, the obstacles along the way become less discouraging and feel more like learning opportunities.

Moonlighting to Find Your Path

While today people commonly believe that you must choose between a real job and your passion, Rober showed that it's not how it should go. He told Jay Shetty that he only left his job at Apple after he reached 10 million YouTube subscribers. He is an advocate of the "yes and" approach, where you can combine your passion with the job that provides your steady income. In his opinion, this approach helps you prove to yourself that you truly love the work, even when it's inconvenient or pays no money.

Yet Rober didn't transition directly from engineer to content creator. For a Halloween party, he used two iPads to create the illusion of a hole through his body, and the video went viral. While still working at NASA, he created Digital Dudz, a company selling Halloween costumes, a business which he grew while still employed. After working in the costume business for two years, Rober transitioned into a new role at Apple. He told Jay Shetty that life is unpredictable, and that's why it's important to become good at whatever is in front of you, so that the next doors will open naturally.

The Secret to Going Viral

When it comes to his YouTube success, Rober admitted to Jay Shetty that he disguises educational content as entertainment, similarly to hiding vegetables in the food, so the kids don't see them. He teaches science and engineering by catching viewers' attention with a stunt, so they don't even realize they are learning. He believes that if he told them upfront something like "I'm going to teach you about magnetism", people would be bored. Instead, he smashes a watermelon with a 10-pound hammer, flying into an MRI machine to grab the audience's attention.

Mark Rober told Jay Shetty that storytelling is the most important skill for an engineer – at Apple, he learned that the best engineers were also great communicators and could make people feel something. A study analyzing over 7000 New York Times articles showed that people react to content that provokes strong, physiological emotions, such as anger, awe, or anxiety.¹ Rober focuses on connecting to his audience on an emotional level, which makes his content so successful.

Engineering Your Personal Life

Rober's engineering mindset isn't limited to his professional endeavors; he even applied it to his search for a life partner. He admitted to Jay Shetty that, after a difficult separation from his ex-wife, he found it hard to be vulnerable again. But he eventually decided to treat dating with the same iterative process he used in the lab.

He set goals, one of them being to go on 30 FaceTime dates in 30 days, and keep each call to 20 minutes to see if there is a connection. He met many amazing, accomplished women, but there was no spark. When he was about to give up, he had one more call with the one who had become his new life partner.

Science Made Fun

One of Robert’s proudest achievements is the creation of Crunch Labs, which he describes to Jay Shetty as a "Willy Wonka factory for engineering." The facility features secret passageways, a rock-paper-scissors robot that always wins, and an infinite slinky staircase. Through Crunch Labs, Rober sells Build Boxes that ship a new toy to kids every month, teaching them the engineering principles that make the toys work.

His goal is to foster creativity and inspire children.

According to Rober, children's creativity flourishes when gently guided. His company also produces creative kits meant to encourage more girls to enter STEM fields. In his opinion, creativity is a muscle; the more kids spend time in a creative space, the easier it becomes for them to innovate.

Mark Rober shared with Jay Shetty his current project, which he calls the most important thing he would do in his life: a full science curriculum for third through eighth grades. The estimated cost is approximately $55 million to produce, but it will be free for teachers. The curriculum uses all the tricks Rober uses in his videos to catch the students' attention. In his view, teachers must have the children's attention in order to teach them, so the curriculum includes high-production videos featuring guest stars like Cristiano Ronaldo to make science exciting.

Philosophizing About the Universe

Mark Rober and Jay Shetty reflected on the vastness of the universe and Fermi's Paradox², a famous question in astronomy and astrobiology that asks why we haven't seen signs of extraterrestrial life yet, given the universe's vastness. He outlines several hypotheses, including the possibility of self-destructing civilizations, predatory advanced species, or humanity being deliberately isolated like a protected tribe. Rober emphasizes how the scale of the universe (more stars than grains of sand on Earth) makes the potential for life both overwhelming and awe-inspiring.³‍

When it comes to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), Rober has mixed feelings, referencing Nick Bostrom’s analogy of sparrows raising an owl⁴ to illustrate the risks of creating a superintelligent system that might not align with human interests. However, he also notes AI’s potential to reduce scarcity and human suffering. Jay Shetty added that, while we cannot stop innovation, we must focus on protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the people building AI "have a soul".

Rober highlighted his philanthropic projects, such as Team Trees and Team Water, which mobilized millions of small donations to create large-scale environmental impact. To him, it's paramount to inspire young people because small, early influences are like tiny spacecraft adjustments that lead to massive long-term trajectory changes.

More From Jay Shetty

Listen to the entire On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast episode “Mark Rober: Feeling Stuck in a Rut? Use THIS Simple 3- Step Method Engineers Use to FINALLY Turn Your Ideas Into Reality!” now in the iTunes store or on Spotify. For more inspirational stories and messages like this, check out Jay’s website at jayshetty.me.

¹Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 192–205, https://jonahberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ViralityB.pdf. 

²Geoffrey A. Landis, “The Fermi Paradox: An Approach Based on Percolation Theory” (Cleveland, OH: NASA Lewis Research Center, 1994), PDF, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940022867/downloads/19940022867.pdf 

³NASA Universe, “There are more stars in the entire universe than grains of sand that form all the beaches on Earth,” Facebook video, July 7, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1082510636559121 

⁴Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).