How to make learning impossibly fun | Mark Rober

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Think back to your favorite teacher, the one that made you want to lean in. I think for a lot of us, teachers like that felt like an exception. Former NASA engineer turned YouTube creator Mark Rober has spent his career trying to make them the rule.
He says the secret to reaching anyone, student, a skeptic, a room full of strangers, isn't what you would expect.

**Mark Rober** (0:36)
If you want to reach someone's brain, you have to enter through the heart. This is why if you're trying to convince someone out of being a conspiracy theorist, someone who believes the earth is flat, you can't go to them with a list of facts. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

**Elise Hu** (0:52)
In this conversation with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, Mark digs in to how he has spent his career making science impossible to look away from. As a former NASA engineer, he spent years on the Mars Curiosity Rover before becoming one of the most beloved science communicators on the planet. We shared his TED Talk back in May, where he announced a free science curriculum aimed at making science the class kids actually want to show up for. A talk that, by the way, has become one of our most watched of 2026 already.
Mark calls his approach, hiding the vegetables or sneaking real science into stuff that's just fun to watch.

**Mark Rober** (1:31)
They don't care what you know until they know that you care. If you start them knowing that you care, even if it's just like in your level of effort and paying attention to them, you'll find it's easier to reach them.

**Elise Hu** (1:42)
In today's conversation, Mark talks about his boldest project yet. He also explains why he thinks the most important skill in the age of AI is simply knowing how to ask a good question. And he shares the moment on the TED stage that brought him to tears. It's coming up right after a short break.
And now our TED conversation of the day.

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (2:15)
Hello, TED members. I am Whitney Pennington Rodgers. I'm a curator here at TED, and I am so excited to be here with you today for this live member event. All right, now I want to think for a moment about your favorite teacher.
Maybe some of you are students right now and you don't have to pull back into the far reaches of your memory like I do. But I want you to think about this person and the things that made them so special. How excited they might have made you feel, how they made the subject they were teaching you come alive and made you want to lean in during their lessons and not zone out. I think for a lot of us, teachers like this maybe feel like the exception instead of the rule. And when it comes to science, maybe even more so.
But what if that didn't have to be the case? What if science could be the class that kids cannot wait to get to because it makes them laugh and beg to try everything out there for themselves? Our guest today has spent a lot of time trying to make science lessons just like that. He's a former NASA engineer, a YouTube phenom with tens of millions of subscribers and is undoubtedly one of the most beloved science communicators of our time. There is no question about this. Earlier this year, he took the TED stage at our flagship conference to share his boldest project yet, a $60 million bet on the next generation of problem solvers and a new STEM curriculum designed to make science the class kids actually want to be in. That talk has since become one of our most viewed talks of 2026 so far, and he's here today to share more with us about that project, the philosophy behind what he does and break down how it sparks excitement about science again and again for kids of all ages all over the world. Please give a warm welcome to Mark Rober.

**Mark Rober** (4:00)
Hello, how's everyone doing?

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (4:03)
Hey Mark, how's it going?

**Mark Rober** (4:05)
Good. Good.

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (4:06)
Thanks so much for being here with us today. The big reveal in your talk was the public announcement of your free STEM science curriculum for kids ages, I guess grades three through eight, class crunch labs.
You talk a lot about that in the talk and that's a big thing that you put forward. What led you to create it?