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Episode: How Mark Rober hides "science vegetables" in viral videos

Author: TED
Duration: 00:41:08

Episode Shownotes

If you don't know Mark Rober, your kids do. He's best known for his viral engineering feats — like creating an obstacle course for squirrels, designing glitter bombs to get revenge on package thieves and building the world's largest Nerf gun. Before launching YouTube's most followed science channel, he was

a NASA engineer, and he now runs his own company, CrunchLabs, designing monthly STEM subscription boxes that teach kids how to think, build, play and solve like engineers. Mark joins Adam to share his secrets to online engagement, his storytelling techniques and how to apply the scientific method to everyday life. They also discuss the importance of feeling ownership of your work, the case for sending humans to Mars and how they're rethought their approaches to parenting.Available transcripts for ReThinking can be found at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts

Full Transcript

00:00:08 Speaker_01
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00:01:49 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:00 Speaker_03
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.

00:02:10 Speaker_03
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.

00:02:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:02:35 Speaker_03
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.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
Or how, to deter porch pirates from stealing his packages, he baited them with glitter bombs that explode when packages are opened and catch the thief red-handed on camera.

00:02:56 Speaker_04
— That's what's so cool about being an engineer. If something doesn't exist, you can just freaking will it into existence. Like, what a superpower, right?

00:03:07 Speaker_03
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.

00:03:18 Speaker_03
Today, Mark and I are talking about the joy and wonder of learning and teaching, too.

00:03:28 Speaker_04
I feel like I know you pretty well, Adam.

00:03:31 Speaker_03
We've met one time. Come on.

00:03:32 Speaker_04
No, but like I know you parasocially 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 going to be some gotcha interview.

00:03:46 Speaker_03
What was your perception of me and what did I do to validate it?

00:03:49 Speaker_04
Just like a very curious individual, not afraid to say what they want to 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. Well, thank you.

00:04:04 Speaker_04
You definitely are exactly who you claim to be. Mmm, I like hearing that. I think that matters on YouTube, like authenticity is the currency of YouTube.

00:04:14 Speaker_04
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 eventually falls down.

00:04:26 Speaker_03
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? Just start with a speech. That's your content.

00:04:40 Speaker_03
And then it hit me, no, you have a relationship with your audience, who is not the MIT crowd, and you're going to speak to them before you show them the speech you gave to another group of people.

00:04:50 Speaker_04
Plus, you need a banger intro, Adam, as we say in the industry. You gotta hook them. You gotta tell them like why it's worth staying before you just get into a boring speech.

00:05:00 Speaker_03
I think that that's fair. But on the other hand, some people would say make the beginning of the speech the banger. No? YouTube is a different medium, right?

00:05:07 Speaker_04
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?

00:05:18 Speaker_04
I'm the YouTube guy. All right, you don't get me. I'll trust you on speaking and writing books. This is my area of expertise.

00:05:28 Speaker_03
Damn right it is. Part of what I want to do today is learn from it. But I feel like we need to start at the beginning. I want to know what your childhood was like. Were you constantly getting in trouble, building things that exploded?

00:05:40 Speaker_04
I think 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.

00:05:56 Speaker_04
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.

00:06:08 Speaker_04
I didn't I didn't see this anywhere. So there's like a novel way of approaching this problem. And I just remember her response was like so positive and she just loved it. She even took a picture.

00:06:19 Speaker_04
That means it's an important moment because you only have so many pictures back in the day, right? That was like a seminal moment.

00:06:26 Speaker_04
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.

00:06:33 Speaker_04
I want to put this out into the world and I want to share it with other people and get feedback and then make it better.

00:06:40 Speaker_03
You're the center of a Venn diagram of an engineer, a gamer, and a prankster.

00:06:48 Speaker_04
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.

00:06:56 Speaker_04
Even like if I'm around my niece or nephews, just tapping someone on the opposite shoulder 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?

00:07:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:23 Speaker_04
But then you're like, you know what, if anyone's going to 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.

00:07:34 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:43 Speaker_04
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?

00:07:51 Speaker_04
Each year we would like level up how crazy, how much crazier we could make the engineering. 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, like 750 million views.

00:08:06 Speaker_04
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. It's the ultimate revenge of the nerds, I think.

00:08:18 Speaker_03
Yes.

00:08:21 Speaker_04
Where do these ideas take shape? 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?

00:08:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:08:45 Speaker_04
But just thinking like an engineer is seeing the opportunities as they come to you in real life for making some really engaging content that can

00:08:54 Speaker_04
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.

00:09:06 Speaker_04
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.

00:09:16 Speaker_03
At some level, 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.

00:09:30 Speaker_03
One of those big tech companies that I can't name, but you are familiar with them and you've used a lot of their products, but you didn't work there.

00:09:39 Speaker_03
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 I think about your nine years at NASA. The Curiosity rover is amazing.

00:09:51 Speaker_03
And I want to talk to you about what you learned from building it. But I'm also like, why did no one at NASA think to build a reusable rocket until Elon came along? Why are we blowing this up every time we build it?

00:10:03 Speaker_03
I guess what I'm curious about is, is it the kind of people that are attracted to engineering who sometimes go into that closed-minded, I'm going to criticize or prosecute anybody who challenges my thinking mode?

00:10:16 Speaker_03
Or is there something about engineering training that sometimes creates these mental obstacles and entrenches people cognitively?

00:10:24 Speaker_04
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?

00:10:34 Speaker_04
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.

00:10:43 Speaker_04
I make these videos, but of course the comment section is always like, well, actually, if you use a double dual amplifier on that, you know, And I'm like, okay, okay, yes.

00:10:53 Speaker_04
I realized there might've been like a 2% more optimal way to do this thing, right?

00:10:57 Speaker_04
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 superpower, right?

00:11:16 Speaker_04
Engineers love to optimize. any problem, but so often it's the wrong problem to even be optimizing.

00:11:23 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:35 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:46 Speaker_04
That's bold, and you will get pushback, right? But it's not an easy path to get there.

00:11:52 Speaker_04
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 going to end up in the same spot.

00:11:59 Speaker_03
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 going to work and I proved them wrong.

00:12:11 Speaker_03
And therefore, that means that whenever people tell me something is not going to work, I'm right and they're wrong.

00:12:17 Speaker_04
But I think there is something to be said, I think with these big leaders where their crystal ball is just like a little bit clearer than the rest of ours. And I think that helps them be confident.

00:12:28 Speaker_04
I think sometimes that clairvoyance helps you like really push and be confident in your decision.

00:12:35 Speaker_03
I think that clairvoyance only works, though, when you're in a system that has linear rules. The laws of physics are sort of immutable, last time I checked. The laws of human behavior change constantly.

00:12:52 Speaker_03
One of the fears I have with people who are really great at engineering is that they are working from a set of fixed premises.

00:12:58 Speaker_03
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.

00:13:11 Speaker_04
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?

00:13:25 Speaker_04
We should be doing it this other way.

00:13:27 Speaker_03
Talk to me a little bit about your time at NASA. I'm really curious, no pun intended, to hear about what you learned from working on Curiosity.

00:13:35 Speaker_04
I was a fairly young engineer, but they assigned me, like, a chunk of the rover. Like, I was responsible for the jet pack that lowers it to the ground.

00:13:44 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:56 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:09 Speaker_04
Now, we had reviews, we had like greybeards, you know, you'd have these people who had a lot of experience who I present my design to, and they tell me the 45 reasons why it's terrible, and it's going to fail the way I've designed it.

00:14:21 Speaker_04
And I'm like, okay, good point, you go back and you fix it. But ultimately, that hardware was mine, and I was the one who was expected to have sleepless nights worrying about it. And I did.

00:14:33 Speaker_04
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

00:14:43 Speaker_04
internalize 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. You know, I think you steal so much of their potential brainpower by dealing with it in that way.

00:15:00 Speaker_03
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.

00:15:11 Speaker_03
And that gives you a sense of responsibility. It leads you to develop new skills. It boosts your confidence. It leads to all kinds of creative problem-solving and risk-taking efforts.

00:15:22 Speaker_03
I love the way that you not only had that, right, but now you're creating it for kids.

00:15:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, and 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?

00:15:34 Speaker_04
And they cycle through and I'll come in on Saturday and they're here in part because, you know, they really want to deliver something good, but they love it and they're feeling the ownership and it's exciting, right?

00:15:44 Speaker_04
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.

00:15:50 Speaker_03
Well, I think of a lot of your work as a giant Trojan horse. You have these sensational videos. I'm going to watch a squirrel have to navigate a maze in order to get the food out of the bird feeder.

00:16:02 Speaker_03
Or I'm going to wonder, 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.

00:16:12 Speaker_04
Yeah, I like to say like hiding the vegetables, right? And that's what we're doing, right?

00:16:16 Speaker_04
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?

00:16:25 Speaker_04
Between my channel and CrunchLab is 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.

00:16:39 Speaker_04
And they're choosing to watch science content and then choosing to watch more of it.

00:16:43 Speaker_04
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.

00:16:56 Speaker_04
You want people who think like engineers, even if you end up being a vet or a firefighter, it means, you know, failure is part of the process and that you should test hypotheses and see what works and what doesn't.

00:17:05 Speaker_04
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.

00:17:18 Speaker_03
I will say the thing that surprised me most about your videos over the years is how long they are. We're in a world where everything is getting shorter. And every time I hear that, I think of a recent meta-analysis.

00:17:32 Speaker_03
So I'm going to nerd out on this one for a second. This is a synthesis of 179 studies across 32 countries looking at concentration tests that are given to people starting in 1990 all the way up to 2021.

00:17:47 Speaker_03
And it turns out that adults have gotten better over time, and kids have not gotten worse. Really? That's fascinating. I mean, it's so interesting, right, that this is not an ability issue. I think it's a motivation issue.

00:18:02 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:12 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:22 Speaker_04
People know the difference between steak and popcorn, right? Sometimes you want popcorn, but you very rarely feel good about that choice afterwards, right?

00:18:31 Speaker_04
But steak is like nourishing and you remember that and you can crave steak because you're just like, I'm just in the mood for something hearty. What I try and deliver is steak and people remember that.

00:18:41 Speaker_04
And 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, I'm an okay engineer.

00:18:55 Speaker_04
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 something people don't realize is what's actually happening.

00:19:06 Speaker_04
I still write every single one of my videos and it's a laborious, time-consuming process that uses a lot of my brainpower. Like that is a skill that I hopefully have gotten better and better over time.

00:19:19 Speaker_03
I think this speaks to one of 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

00:19:30 Speaker_03
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.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
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, OK, I'm going to write this whole story. I'm going to make this long video.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
I'm going to put it out there. And it might be crickets in response. What advice do you give to people for starting on that journey?

00:19:57 Speaker_04
There's a lot of good reasons to start a YouTube channel or social platform. Right. When I started doing these videos in 2011, no one knew you could even make money off these platforms. I did it because I loved sharing these ideas. Right.

00:20:14 Speaker_04
And it felt really cool. If you put it out there and it's crickets, go back and watch my first videos. This is what I love about anyone on like YouTube is like, it was so cringy. It was so bad.

00:20:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:51 Speaker_03
You're reminding me of a Duncan Watt 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.

00:21:01 Speaker_03
And once you cleared that bar, 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.

00:21:11 Speaker_03
And if you got early exposure, then you got the earworm, it got stuck in people's heads, and it would take off. And I think that really underscores your point that this is a lottery at some fundamental level.

00:21:24 Speaker_04
The way I view life is 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.

00:21:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:21:51 Speaker_04
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.

00:22:01 Speaker_04
This is why a lot of times it's like world's largest nerf 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.

00:22:11 Speaker_04
And for me, that's so creatively fulfilling because I can make a video about bed bugs because I've always been fascinated by them and we could still pull 40 million views on it.

00:22:21 Speaker_03
Well, the fact 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, that end justifies the means.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
I do worry, though, that we're creating a culture that's increasingly sensationalized, that expectations are skyrocketing for how interesting content has to be to capture my attention.

00:22:46 Speaker_03
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.

00:22:54 Speaker_03
And then 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?

00:23:09 Speaker_04
I don't make the rules, I just play by them. Like, I want to 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.

00:23:19 Speaker_04
When you get in the trenches and you're actually doing something, which is a big reason why we started CrunchLab. So you get these boxes coming to your door every month and they're fun toys, right? It's a really fun toy.

00:23:30 Speaker_04
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.

00:23:42 Speaker_04
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.

00:23:51 Speaker_04
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.

00:24:04 Speaker_04
So it's just, it feels so freaking good to see that.

00:24:07 Speaker_03
This goes to something else I wanted to talk about, which is going to Mars.

00:24:11 Speaker_03
There's 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.

00:24:28 Speaker_03
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.

00:24:40 Speaker_03
The same way that the moon landing just, I think, sparked a generation of scientists and engineers and kids who wanted to be astronauts.

00:24:47 Speaker_03
And I think creating that curiosity, that hope, that optimism, that sense of possibility is, to me, one of the more compelling reasons to go.

00:24:56 Speaker_03
Where do you come down on this, having worked on one of the early technologies that will make it possible for us to go to Mars? Like, why should we go?

00:25:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:25:19 Speaker_04
We went to Venus, and we explored Venus, and they basically have runaway global warming. Understanding Venus, you know, helps us understand us.

00:25:27 Speaker_04
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.

00:25:42 Speaker_03
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00:26:10 Speaker_01
Something about the way we're working just isn't working.

00:26:13 Speaker_01
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00:26:26 Speaker_01
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00:26:41 Speaker_03
Let's go to a lightning round. Tell me what the worst advice you've ever gotten is.

00:26:47 Speaker_04
My dad told me I needed to get serious and stop pranking people as a kid. He said, at some point, you're going to have to get serious about life, Mark. And it's worked out OK for me. He's a great dad, by the way.

00:27:00 Speaker_04
He gives very solid advice, but he was off on that one. Missed the mark there. No pun intended. Best advice. You're not as good as you think you are, and you're also not as bad as you think you are.

00:27:12 Speaker_04
There's a regression to the meaning, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Don't get cocky, but don't be so sad when you screw up.

00:27:18 Speaker_03
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?

00:27:29 Speaker_04
Give me a second, because 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.

00:27:43 Speaker_04
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 my hot take now is like, It's a beautiful framework for a lot of people.

00:27:56 Speaker_04
It's a form of religion, but there's no oppression, and it really stretches people to be a better version of themselves.

00:28:05 Speaker_03
Wow. Okay, I have to fight with you on this a little bit.

00:28:08 Speaker_05
Fight me.

00:28:09 Speaker_03
I think astrology is not a victimless crime. I think that in part because there is an MIT-led paper by Jackson Liu on discrimination and stereotyping, where if you are a Virgo in China,

00:28:25 Speaker_03
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.

00:28:37 Speaker_03
And people think, like, super disagreeable, unpleasant, fussy, ornery. And people do this all the time. We see it in America, too. People will ask me what my sign is and then want to judge me based on that.

00:28:51 Speaker_04
I completely agree with you on this point. Like everything, moderation in all things, it's the aspect of making you a better person and that framework that matters. I'll take it another step further.

00:29:01 Speaker_04
When you get a reading and they tell you something about your future that then changes how you live through your life, that's where it's like, clearly I draw the line.

00:29:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:29:19 Speaker_03
I guess I could come around to the idea that if people are just kind of using it for fun and 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, yeah, there are a lot of tools that can help with that.

00:29:39 Speaker_03
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.

00:29:50 Speaker_03
However, my other worry about astrology is that it can be a gateway drug to a failure of the very critical thinking that you stand for.

00:30:00 Speaker_03
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

00:30:11 Speaker_03
They are more likely to believe that vaccines are a massive net negative for human health. They are more likely to believe that 9-11 was an inside job perpetuated by the U.S. government.

00:30:25 Speaker_03
I do think that there's an element of accepting things at face value 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.

00:30:42 Speaker_04
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?

00:30:54 Speaker_04
and astrology, is the same meta-analysis point out the same correlation?

00:31:00 Speaker_03
Maybe. You're right. Believing too strongly in anything can lead to these sorts of effects. The difference is that you can't falsify religion. Whatever deity you believe in,

00:31:14 Speaker_03
I cannot run any randomized controlled trials or longitudinal studies to prove to you that your beliefs are not real.

00:31:20 Speaker_03
Whereas with astrology, right, there is a literal zero correlation between either your zodiac sign and any of your personality traits.

00:31:27 Speaker_03
We can also, we can listen carefully to astrophysicists who tell us that there's no way that either through, you know, through gravity or through light that other planets and stars can have any impact on your psyche.

00:31:41 Speaker_03
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?

00:31:52 Speaker_04
There are certain aspects of certain religions that you can disprove. That's not true for all religions. There's certain claims that can be disproved, but it doesn't change people's minds.

00:32:03 Speaker_04
reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Oh, good point. Like my mom converted and became religious and it improved her life so much. And I think she was a better human.

00:32:15 Speaker_04
She raised better kids because of this framework she had. And I think a lot of people want to throw the baby out with the bath water and be like, but, but it's not true.

00:32:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:32:36 Speaker_03
No, look, I'm receptive to that point of view. I don't have anything against organized religion, especially if...

00:32:43 Speaker_03
The religion is teaching values that we can agree are character strengths and virtues, and not encouraging people to discriminate or to cause harm in the name of a god.

00:32:53 Speaker_03
I just think it's dangerous to hold positions that you didn't 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.

00:33:06 Speaker_04
Are there any beliefs you hold, I'm going to turn this on you, that you think you hold that you didn't reason yourself into? Are you that much of a logic bully?

00:33:13 Speaker_03
I hope not. I want you to find one, actually.

00:33:16 Speaker_04
This is my new thing. I'm going to be thinking about this all day and I'm going to text you and be like, I got it.

00:33:21 Speaker_03
There's maybe a basic one, which is, I believe that human beings are more good than bad. But I'm also not that attached to that belief.

00:33:31 Speaker_03
And if somebody could prove it wrong, I'd be like, OK, 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.

00:33:41 Speaker_04
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?

00:33:53 Speaker_04
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.

00:34:04 Speaker_04
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 going to be fine. You're going to be fine. Don't worry.

00:34:16 Speaker_04
And if you're not going to 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.

00:34:25 Speaker_03
There is some research to back up your point of view. I really like the work that Jared Clifton and his colleagues have done on what they call primals, which are the core beliefs we have about the world that we live in.

00:34:36 Speaker_03
And one of their findings across a series of studies is that when people believe the world is generally a good and safe place, they end up with better mental health and they also achieve higher success.

00:34:48 Speaker_03
Because so much of assuming the worst can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll find it. Or you'll elicit it, is the other risk.

00:34:57 Speaker_04
Yeah, that's true. I mean, Gottman studied this with marriages, and the number one predictor of divorce is contempt. Meaning, if you hear the door slam, you assume, my partner did this because he's just a terrible person, or she's a bad person.

00:35:11 Speaker_03
Look at you quoting psychology from past guests.

00:35:15 Speaker_03
And I don't see any reason, by the way, that you can't teach those beliefs 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?

00:35:30 Speaker_03
So you can believe in the good and still guard against the bad, I think is a reasonable premise. What's a question you have for me?

00:35:38 Speaker_04
What is something recently in your life that you have been forced to rethink? How often do you practice this? Let's hear it from the author himself.

00:35:48 Speaker_03
Well, you were actually there for a rethinking moment in real time. So we were at an event last weekend and our oldest daughter Joanna came. And there was a parenting session, and one of the moderators put her on the spot.

00:36:04 Speaker_03
She was, at the time, the only kid in the room. And basically asked, what do you think that the parents in the room could do better?

00:36:14 Speaker_04
Which is an incredible setup, by the way. And she handled it like an absolute legend.

00:36:21 Speaker_03
I was so proud of her that I had to say, what do I do now? Do I take notes or do I leave the room?

00:36:26 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:40 Speaker_03
And sometimes she just wants sympathy or validation or a chance to be heard. And I have been working on this for a long time and just consistently failing on it.

00:36:53 Speaker_03
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. I don't tell people problems unless I want their help solving them.

00:37:06 Speaker_04
In another life, you would make such a great engineer.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
I think you might have missed your true calling. Realizing that most people actually are just looking for support. One of my mentors used to say, sympathy, not solutions. And I think it's a good mantra to remember.

00:37:23 Speaker_03
And do you, so how does this look like in practice now? We actually, we were given a phrase by a psychologist who was listening to that conversation who said, why don't you ask, are you looking for a tissue box, a soap box or a toolbox?

00:37:38 Speaker_03
As a parent, I'd be curious to hear your take on this as also a parent with, you have a teenager as well, right? An 18 year old?

00:37:45 Speaker_03
So I had a lot of debates with people, especially when our kids were younger, about what's the right balance between demanding and supportive. And sometimes I worried that we were too supportive.

00:38:01 Speaker_03
You know, like Allison and I would sit down 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. It's not your job to be a better parent.

00:38:14 Speaker_03
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.

00:38:28 Speaker_03
It made me think that no, we were not listening too much to our kids. We were not creating too much psychological safety because we built a relationship where they can tell us what they really think.

00:38:39 Speaker_03
And so I guess I felt in her telling me my failures, I felt successful.

00:38:45 Speaker_04
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 giving the floor of all your peers to say what kind of dad you are. My son is, he's autistic.

00:38:58 Speaker_04
So he's on the autism spectrum, which 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.

00:39:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:39:21 Speaker_04
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,

00:39:35 Speaker_04
We have YouTube friends, which means when we're out in public and people come up and want a picture, he's 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?

00:39:43 Speaker_04
Does your house have stairs? 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.

00:39:56 Speaker_04
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.

00:40:07 Speaker_03
That is really sweet. I love that. So how are you going to turn our household upside down during the holiday season?

00:40:16 Speaker_04
Oh, okay. Something I'm insanely excited about. For the past three and a half years, I've been working on a project. We built a satellite, just me and my team, just a bunch of normal civilians that's going to space.

00:40:31 Speaker_04
It's launching in January on a Falcon 9. 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.

00:40:41 Speaker_04
You could upload your picture to the satellite and then you could get your picture in space, a selfie with the Earth photobombing you.

00:40:48 Speaker_04
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.

00:40:56 Speaker_04
So you could technically be in the picture twice because we'll tell you exactly where to take the picture. And of course, that is free if you're a CrunchLab subscriber. And of course, you could just sign up and get it now.

00:41:07 Speaker_04
Grow your brain in amazing ways. And if you're not, all you got to do is sponsor one box for a kid who can't afford it. So this amazing, this site, you know, those billionaires want to charge you $30 million to go up and get your picture in space.

00:41:20 Speaker_04
We're basically doing it for free. And this is another example of like, man, I would have loved this as a kid, right? Just like an actual selfie in space. You're going to be in space. And I've really, really excited to tell the world about that.

00:41:34 Speaker_04
Thank you, Mark. So fun. Great to be here, Adam.

00:41:40 Speaker_03
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.

00:41:51 Speaker_03
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?

00:42:03 Speaker_03
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.

00:42:17 Speaker_03
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.

00:42:35 Speaker_03
The show is part of the TED Audio Collective. And this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Mah and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin.

00:42:48 Speaker_03
Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highlash, Benben Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

00:43:11 Speaker_04
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 when I finally see she has nipples, only pregnant female squirrels have visible nipples.

00:43:26 Speaker_04
And what an uncomfortable realization that was for me. And then 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.

00:43:44 Speaker_04
You're screwing everything up. All right.

00:43:46 Speaker_03
This is our Easter egg. Please cut that out. We're definitely playing that at the end. It's perfect.