Mark Rober

Mark Rober spent nine years as an engineer at NASA, helping to build a rover that landed on Mars. He is far better known for what he did next: using glitter bombs, obstacle courses for squirrels and enormous backyard experiments to make engineering and science some of the most-watched content on YouTube.

Orange County

He was born on 11 March 1980 in Orange County, California. He was a curious, hands-on child who liked to take things apart and build contraptions, and his father encouraged the habit.

He studied mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University in Utah, and took a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.

NASA

He joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and worked there for about nine years, much of the time on the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in August 2012. He has described the landing as one of the great moments of his life.

JPL also taught him something about failure. Spacecraft are tested exhaustively because on Mars there are no second chances, and he became fascinated by how engineers learn from mistakes — an idea he would later make the centre of his teaching.

A Costume Goes Viral

He started posting on YouTube in 2011 as a hobby. His first big success was a Halloween costume: two iPads, one on his front and one on his back, each showing live video of the other side, so that he appeared to have a hole through his body. The video went viral, and he set up a small company, Digital Dudz, to sell costumes based on the idea.

He kept his engineering career, later working for several years as a product designer at Apple, while making occasional videos. Slowly the channel became the main job.

The Glitter Bomb

His breakthrough came in December 2018. After a parcel was stolen from his doorstep, he spent months engineering a decoy package. When a thief opened it, it sprayed fine glitter, released a foul smell and recorded the thief’s reaction on hidden cameras. The video drew tens of millions of views and made him a household name, and he made several sequels.

Other hits followed: an elaborate obstacle course built to test the intelligence of squirrels raiding his bird feeder, and a giant version of the classic elephant-toothpaste chemistry demonstration. Each video wrapped a real engineering or science lesson inside a story that was fun to watch.

In 2018 he gave a TEDx talk, “The Super Mario Effect”, arguing that people learn better when they focus on the reward and treat failure as part of the game, as players do in video games.

Team Trees and Team Seas

In 2019 he joined MrBeast to launch Team Trees, which funded the planting of twenty million trees. In 2021 they launched Team Seas, which raised more than $30 million to remove rubbish from oceans, rivers and beaches, and in 2025 they followed it with Team Water, which raised money to provide clean drinking water.

CrunchLabs

In 2022 he launched CrunchLabs, a subscription business that sends children a box each month containing a toy to build themselves, with a video in which he explains the engineering behind it. The idea was to turn his style of teaching into something children could hold. It grew into a significant business, and his team moved into a large workshop and studio.

In November 2025 Netflix began showing Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs, a compilation series of his videos for families, and in June 2026 it added Camp CrunchLabs. His YouTube channel has around 78 million subscribers, making it one of the largest science and engineering channels in the world.

Debate

Not every video was simply admired. In March 2025 he published a test comparing a Tesla using camera-based driver assistance with a car using lidar sensors, including a stunt in which the Tesla drove into a wall painted to look like the road. Some Tesla supporters criticised his methods, and he released additional footage in response. The episode showed how much weight his videos now carried in public arguments about technology.

His videos are also carefully engineered as stories. He has explained in talks to other creators that every video needs a clear question, rising stakes and a satisfying payoff, and that the science has to be woven into the story rather than added as a lecture. That approach is a large part of why adults watch his videos as eagerly as children.

The measure of him is that he never stopped being an engineer. Every video, however silly, is a design problem solved on camera: define the goal, build a prototype, watch it fail, improve it. He has turned that process into entertainment, and in doing so taught millions of children that failing is how you learn.

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