Marshall Brain

Marshall David Brain II (May 17, 1961 – November 20, 2024) was an American author, public speaker, futurist, businessman, and academic, who specialized in making complex topics easier to understand for the general public. He was the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and the author of the How Stuff Works book series. He hosted the National Geographic channel's Factory Floor with Marshall Brain and Who Knew? With Marshall Brain.

Early life and education Marshall Brain was born in Santa Monica, California, where his father designed components for Moon rockets. He also wrote computer programming manuals and ran a software training and consulting company.

Business career In 1998, Brain founded the website HowStuffWorks.com as a hobby. Discovery purchased the website for $250 million in 2007 and introduced its television show How Stuff Works in 2008.

In addition to his How Stuff Works nonfiction book series, Brain wrote about robotics, transhumanism, and atheism, including his books The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches (2015) and Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future (2012). Brain maintained that automation and robots will lead to unemployment for humans, such as 1.5 million big-rig truck drivers in the U.S. losing their jobs to self-driving cars, requiring a government guaranteed minimum income.

Personal life and death Brain resided in Cary, North Carolina, with his wife Leigh Ann and four children. In 2018, he was a speaker during the March for Science, a protest against President Donald Trump.

Brain was found dead in his office at Centennial Campus on November 20, 2024, at the age of 63. His death certificate described the cause of death as suicide. Two and a half hours before his body was discovered, he sent an email to over 30 recipients claiming that he had been forced into retirement at North Carolina State after filing an ethics complaint writing “I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university.”

Publications

Television shows Factory Floor with Marshall Brain (2008) – Host Who Knew? With Marshall Brain (2008) – Host