“Do not forget how special and bizarre it is to get to live a human life,” the science communicator and video creator told the Class of 2025.
MIT News
Below is the text of Hank Green’s Commencement remarks as prepared for delivery on May 29.
I don’t really do imposter syndrome, that’s where you feel like you don’t belong. I have a superior syndrome called “Hahaha I fooled them again” syndrome where I know that I don’t belong, but I also am very pleased that I have once again cleverly convinced you that I do.
I, a man you might very well know as a tiktoker, a man who recently blind-ranked AI company logos by how much they look like buttholes, have snuck into giving MIT’s Commencement speech. And I can admit this because you can’t kick me off now, I’ve already started speaking! It would be weird if you stopped … but still, I’m going to try to do a good job.
Hello and thank you very much to everybody for welcoming me out, all the lovely people up here, the president, the governor, the alumni, Class of 75, and also of course, thank you especially to a class of extremely impressive charismatic and attractive students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduating Class of 2025.
To express my thanks: The average human skeleton has more than 25,000 calories. More than half of your bones are in your hands and feet, and all together your skeleton contains enough oxygen atoms that, if you freed them, you could produce around 24 hours of breathable air.
Those were some of my best bone facts, and I assume that good bone facts are a totally normal way for humans to show gratitude.
I gave you my very best bone facts because I owe an extra debt of gratitude to you, the Class of 2025, because more than half of you filled out a survey I sent you! I assume you did it late at night while you should have been p-setting, whatever that is, but instead you did this.
And I have loved looking through your responses and learning a little bit about you, and a little bit from you.
One of the things asked you what the most MIT thing you did at MIT was, and this was my favorite section to read.
Some of it was definitely not meant for me to understand, like several of you counted up all the smoots on the Harvard Bridge.
Whatever that means … good work.
One of you was Tim the Beaver. Another tried to impress a date with train facts.
I see you. Same … but with bones.
A lot, and I mean a lot of you simply said the word “hack,” and the lack of specificity there, I have to say, does make me feel like whatever you did, the statute of limitations has not yet kicked in.
But by far the most common beginning of a sentence in this section was “I built…” You built robots and bridges and incubators and startups and Geiger counters and a remote-controlled shopping cart and a ukelele and an eight-foot-wide periodic table. Y’all built … a lot.
And that is something I found reassuring. We are going to need to do a lot of building.
I took a look at your shoes as you were coming, but it turns out I didn’t need to see them to know I wouldn’t want to be in them.
I think the only people jealous of you right now is the Class of 2026 because I’m sure things will be even more screwed up by the time they’re sitting where you are. But what a terribly messy time to be graduating from college. The attacks on speech, on science, on higher education, on trans rights, on the federal workforce, on the rule of law … they’re coming from inside the house.
Meanwhile, the world is getting hotter faster. And the sudden acceleration in the abilities of artificial intelligence, communication, and biotechnology promise huge opportunities, and massive disruption.
So, if I were you, I would want some advice! But as previously mentioned, I am a TikTok-er who will now forever be known as the first person to ever say the word “butthole” during an MIT commencement speech. So the advice — some of it — is going to come from you. I asked you, in my survey, what you would say to your classmates from a stage like the one I am now on. And here’s a selection.
One of your classmates wrote:
I always forget which Green brother is Hank and which is John!
There is no one definition of success. The idea you have in your head of what success is, it’s going to change, and you should let it.
Is one of your classmates 45 years old?
And here’s another 45-year-old hiding among you:
Open a Roth IRA.
Jeez! Did your dad fill out my survey for you? Seriously though, you should.
Here’s one of my real favorites:
Collaborate and help each other, be brave in reaching out, and be forgiving in your interactions.
Even if it probably won’t work, try anyway.
Don’t start with the solution, start with the problem.
Now a lot of you might be thinking right now: Did he just make us write his Commencement speech for him? And the answer to that is, well, at least you know that Claude didn’t write it.
I’ve had a good time here focusing on the ludicrous aspects of my career, and I do want to emphasize its ludicriousness.
I’ve done TikTok dances to Elmo remixes, and I’ve also published two best-selling science fiction novels. I’ve written fart listicles, and I’ve interviewed presidents. I’ve made multiple videos about giraffe sex, and I’ve sold multiple companies. I helped build an educational media company that provides videos for free to everyone with an internet connection, and our content is used in most American schools.
And yes, that was the section I put in so your parents could feel better about me being here. I left it as long as I could.
I am good at having an idea I believe in and then just doing it, consequences be damned, and that has served me well, though it has not always been relaxing.
And I did that all on the uncertain and rapidly changing ground of online video and social media over the last 20 years. So perhaps I do have something to say to a class of graduates heading out into an uncertain and unstable world.
If I could attribute my success, whatever it is, to anything besides luck, it’s that I literally can’t stop believing that there is any better use of time than learning something new.
And curiosity doesn’t just expand the number of tools you have and how well you’re able to use them, it expands your understanding of the problem space.
And so maybe the advice is very simple. Just be curious about the world and you’ll have everything you need for the future and, look, it is almost that simple.
There’s a really important question I asked y’all in my survey that I haven’t mentioned yet. I asked, “What’s giving you hope?”
And though one of you wrote “Macallan 12,” most of you, in your response, talked entirely about people: my friends, my family, my peers, over and over.
People who care. People who focus on improving life in their communities. People who are standing up for what they believe in. People who see big problems and have the determination to fix them.
At a school like MIT, I imagine that the focus can definitely be on the building and less on the people. This is an institute of technology, not of humanities. But I read the humanity in your answers.
And this brings me back to the simplicity of curiosity leading you both toward understanding problems and acquiring new tools. Because your curiosity is not out of your control. You decide how you orient it, and that orientation is going to affect the entire rest of your life. It may be the single most important factor in your career.
And my guess is that it’s going to be really easy to be focused on the problem of just building ever more powerful tools. That’s exciting stuff and also it can be surprisingly uncomplicated. But even though the problem space is much bigger than just “build bigger tools,” it is surprisingly easy to simply never notice that.
The most powerful mechanisms that steer our focus are … I’m just going to say this … not always designed for our best interests, or the best interests of our world. Social content platforms are great at steering our curiosities and they are, often, designed to make us afraid, to keep us oriented toward impossible problems, or toward the hottest rifts in society.
Meanwhile, the capitalist impulse is very good at keeping us oriented toward the problems that can be most easily monetized, and that means an over-weighting toward the problems that the most powerful and wealthy people are interested in solving.
If we let ourselves be oriented only by those forces, guess what problems we will not pay any attention to. All of the everyday solvable problems of normal people.
I desperately hope that you remain curious about our world’s intensely diverse and massive problem space. Solveable problems! That are not being addressed because our world does not orient us toward them. If you can control your obsessions, you will not just be unstoppable, you will leave this world a much better place than you found it.
This is not about choosing between financial stability and your ideals. No. There is money to be made in these spaces. This is simply about who you include in your problem space, about what you choose to be curious about.
So with that in mind, here’s my advice, from my heart and from my experience.
First, don’t eat grass.
Second, more importantly, one of the problems you will solve is how to find joy in an imperfect world. And you might struggle with not feeling productive unless and until you accept that your own joy can be one of the things you produce.
Third, ideas do not belong in your head. They can’t help anyone in there. I sometimes see people become addicted to their good idea. They love it so much, they can’t bring themselves to expose it to the imperfection of reality. Stop waiting. Get the ideas out. You may fail, but while you fail, you will build new tools.
And fourth, because people are so complex and messy, some of you may be tempted to build around them and not for them. But remember to ask yourself where value and meaning come from, because they don’t come from banks or tech or cap tables. They come from people.
People things are the hardest work, but also often the most important work. Orient yourself not just toward the construction and acquisition of new tools, but to the needs of people, and that include you, it includes your friends and your family. I think we can sometimes feel so powerful and like the world is so big that throwing a birthday party or making a playlist for a friend can seem too insignificant when placed against the enormity of AI and climate change and the erosion of democracy. But those thoughts alienate you from the reality of human existence, from your place as a builder not just of tools, but of meaning. And that’s not just about impact and productivity and problem solving, it is about living a life.
Do. Not. Forget. how special and bizarre it is to get to live a human life. It took 3 billion years for the Earth to go from single-celled life forms to you. That’s more than a quarter of the life of the entire universe. Something very special and strange is happening on this planet and it is you.
The greatest thing you build in your life will be yourself, and trust me on this you are not done yet, I know I’m not. But what you will be building is not just a toolkit. You will be building a person, and you will be doing it for people.
When I asked you what you did at MIT, you said you built, but when I asked you what was giving you hope, you did not say “buildings” you said “people.” So, to the graduating Class of 2025, go forth, for yourself, for others, and for this beautiful, bizarre world.
Thank you.
