MARK ROBER - YouTube creator; owner, CrunchLabs

FOR ENGINEERING A GOOD TIME

- DEVIN GORDON 

PICTURE THE COOLEST, MOST RIDICULOUSLY awesome room you can imagine. Maybe it's got a golf simulator and a billiards table, or radiant-heat floors, or polychromatic India Mahdavi furniture, or meticulously cultivated hygge. Whatever it is, whatever you're envisioning, it would be even better if it had a secret door leading to another room.

And of course, a secret door has to reveal itself in some sick way, like how you run through a wall to get to track 9¾, or wade through a coat closet to get to Narnia, or turn a bronze eagle on a bookshelf, or push the correct button on a soda machine. It can't just be a switch labeled SECRET DOOR, though that'd be kind of funny. That kind of meta humor would be very on-brand for Mark Rober, except that Rober would rig it so that when you flip that switch, you'd get hit with a glitter bomb. Roughly 60 million people watch Rober's monthly videos, though, and every single one would sniff out the trap. A dedicated fan already would've guessed, would've assumed, that there is a secret door somewhere in this room, and they might've even worked out where it is and how to activate it. Rober, however, possesses two magical powers beyond science and engineering-a frictionless access to his boyhood mind, and the instincts of a born storyteller-and that is what enables him to conceive of something we can't, something even cooler than a room with a secret door.

A second secret door.