What did Mark Rober say to MIT students? Speech by NASA engineer turned YouTuber explored

Mark Rober, a former Nasa engineer turned YouTuber who worked on the Mars Curiosity Rover, is making waves on the internet after giving an inspired speech to the 2023 MIT class at their graduation last week. Although Rober is not an alumnus of the prestigious institute, he has a considerable resume, including working at NASA and Apple. He brought his content creation skills to the address by adding a twist to an otherwise conventional event.

Mark Rober is a successful YouTuber and is among the most popular infotainment creators on the platform, bringing his 24 million subscribers' videos based on innovative ideas and science. He has an engineering degree from BYU and USC.

Keeping his eclectic background in mind, his speech at MIT was a mix of conventional wisdom and his understanding of success as a popular YouTuber. This article covers some of the more interesting points in his 20-minute-long speech.

---

Mark Rober delivers commencement speech at MIT written using ChatGPT, flies graduation hat away in a drone at the end

The YouTuber took to the stage at MIT and started his speech with some lighthearted fun, commenting on the warm weather and the engineering college's reluctance to cover up the venue and protect the crowd. During his introduction, while congratulating the class of 2023 for graduating through a global pandemic, he revealed that the whole speech was written by the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Apologizing for any grammatical errors and noting the changing tides of time, Mark Rober announced:

"You are the first graduating class to have persevered through a global pandemic, just as this is the first commencement speech written entirely by ChatGPT. The tech is still very new, so if I make any grammatical errors or threaten to end all human life, that did not come for me."

After talking about leaving his professional engineering career to become a YouTuber, Mark Rover said his monthly video for June 2053 has already been planned out and that it was going to feature the graduating class of 2023:

"I've already decided what my June 2053 video will be. And it's going to be a collab with all of you. It's going to be a retrospective look at all the amazing things this MIT graduating class of 2023 has accomplished. In fact, this right now is the video intro."

The YouTuber masterfully inculcated a video idea for 30 years in the future that includes his target audience on the red platform and sees the participation of students at MIT and their accomplishments over the next three decades.

Mark Rober then took a conventional turn, mentioning three points of advice he wished to share with the graduates to help them secure a place in the video.

These included embracing naive optimism because sometimes not being an expert is an advantage, framing one's failures as something positive so that setbacks become part of the success, and the need to build positive relationships instead of being hung up on people's negative side.

Mark Rober fittingly shared a fourth piece of advice, expounding the benefits of engaging in playful anarchy, something he would employ for his exit as he attached his graduation cap to a drone and flew it away. Thus, it became the first MIT mortarboard to never return after being "thrown."