Hank Green’s Commencement Address to MIT Class of 2025 (Transcript)

And alumni, class of 75, hello, thank you for coming out. And also, of course, thank you to the extremely impressive and charismatic and attractive students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduating class of 2005! 25! You know, 2005, sometimes when you get older, you never really quite know.

Bone Facts: A Unique Way to Express Gratitude

So, to express my thanks, the average human skeleton has more than 25,000 calories. Which is not probably how you thought I was going to finish that sentence. Also, most of your bones are in your hands and feet. That’s more than 50%, just the hands and feet. Also, skeletons’ bones are very oxygen-dense, they have a lot of oxygen in them, a lot of oxygen atoms. If you took all those atoms out and freed them, you could actually create enough breathable air to breathe for more than 24 hours. Those are some of my best bone facts, and I assume that a good way for a normal human to express thanks is with bone facts. And I gave you my very best bone facts because I owe you an extra special amount of gratitude because as the class of 2025, you have done me a favor where I asked a lot of you, or I asked all of you, to fill out a survey, and more than half of you did it. I assume, while you were like supposed to be p-setting or whatever, that is. But instead, you did this. And I appreciate that, I’ve really loved looking through your answers to these questions, learning a little bit about you, learning a little bit from you.

The Most MIT Things You Did

One of the things I asked was what was the most MIT thing you did while you were at MIT, and this was my favorite section to read, because some of it was definitely not meant for me to understand it. Like a lot of you talked about counting smoots on the Harvard Bridge, and I just, that’s great for you. I don’t, thank you. One of you was Tim the Beaver, so that’s pretty MIT. Now that I’m looking at the teleprompter, I realize that Tim is MIT spelled backwards. That’s, I was today years old when I learned that fact. That’s good. I wonder when Tim was formed. Do you guys have your brass rats on your fingers already? Is that, yeah! That’s really cool. Okay.

Another of you tried to, this is very MIT, tried to impress a date with train facts. I see you. Game sees game, except with bones. A lot, and I mean like a suspiciously large number of people responded to this question just with one word, “hack.” In a way that was very like, felt conspiratorial in like whatever it is that you did, maybe the statute of limitations isn’t up yet, so you’re not going to put that down in writing.

But, by far the most common word in this section, if I did a word cloud, is “built.” You built. You built bridges, and robots, and incubators, and startups, and Geiger counters, and an eight foot wide periodic table, and a ukulele. Is the ukulele person here? Hi! How’s it going? Is it a good ukulele? You’re right in the front. I could almost crowd work you. I think probably that’s not how commencement speeches work, though. The point is, y’all built a lot, and that is something that I found reassuring, because we are going to need a lot of building.

A Messy Time to Graduate

As I was walking in here, I took a good look at all your shoes, but it turned out I did not need to look at them to know that I would not want to be in them. I think the only people who are jealous of you right now are the class of 2026, because I’m sure things will be even more screwed up then, but this is a messy time to be a college graduate heading out into the world. The attacks on speech, on higher education, on trans rights, on the federal workforce, on the rule of law, they’re coming from inside the house. This is a lot. Meanwhile, the world is getting hotter faster. The sudden acceleration in the abilities of artificial intelligence, of communications, and of biotechnology promise huge opportunities and tremendous disruption.

Advice From Your Classmates

So, if I were you, I would want some advice. But, as previously mentioned, I am a TikToker who will now and forever be known as the first person to say the word “butthole” during an MIT commencement speech. So, some of the advice is going to come from you. I asked in my survey, what would you say to your classmates from a stage like the one that I am on now, and I’m going to give you a selection.

One of your classmates wrote this, “I always forget which Green Brother is Hank and which one is John.” And, if at all possible, you could just imagine we’re one guy, that would be superior because that guy would be very impressive. But, I don’t need you to know the difference. We are close enough. Another of you, though, I like this one. God, this podium is huge. Did you notice that? This is a lot of podium. It makes me feel little, like I’m a little guy. I asked about it. I was like, “Why is the podium so big?” And, they were like, “It had to fit the seal.” And, then I said, “You could just make a new seal.” And, they did not like that.

Another of you said this, “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.” Oh, that’s some old person advice right there. Who are you? Do you have a 45-year-old out there? There’s another piece of 45-year-old advice that one of you gave. It says this, “Open a Roth IRA.” Did your dad do the survey for you? That’s very dadded, but you should. Open a Roth IRA. Now is the time.

Here’s one of my real favorites. This one made me feel and think. “Collaborate and help each other. Be brave in reaching out and be forgiving in your interactions.” I love that. That is so, like, this is technology, but people. Here’s another one. “Even if it won’t work.” No, sorry, I’ll quote you directly. “Even if it probably won’t work, try anyway.” And, the final one, very MIT, “Don’t start with the solution, start with the problem.”

A Ludicrous Career

Now, a lot of you might be thinking right now, “Did this guy just make us write his commencement speech for him?” And to that I say, at least you didn’t know that I didn’t have Claude do it for me. I’ve, like, had a pretty good time and I knew I was going to have to do this, like, being kind of, like, focus on, like, the ludicrousness of my career. And it has been ludicrous and I am happy to focus on that. It has been very weird. I have done TikTok dances to Elmo remixes. I’ve also published two best-selling science fiction novels. I’ve written fart listicles and I have interviewed presidents and I have made multiple videos about giraffe sex and

I’ve sold multiple companies. I have helped build an educational media company that provides free videos for everyone in the world who has an internet connection and our content is used in most American schools. And thanks. Oh, thanks. And that is the part of the speech that I had to put in so that your parents could feel better about me being here because at this point it was like, okay. I left it as long as I could.

I’m pretty good, it seems like, at having a good idea that I believe in and then just doing it consequences be damned. And that has served me well, though it has not always been a super relaxing way to live a life. And I did all that on a very uncertain and rapidly changing ground of online video and social media over the last 20 years. So perhaps, I hope, I do have something to say to a class of graduates heading out into an uncertain and unstable world.

The Power of Curiosity

If I could attribute my success, whatever it is, to anything besides luck, it is that I cannot stop believing that there is any better use of my time than learning something new. It never even enters into my mind. If I learn something new that day, that is a good day. And this curiosity doesn’t just expand the number of tools that you have access to and how well you’re able to use them, it expands your understanding of the problem space.

And that is so much of what ideas are. It’s a bunch of tools that you can apply to problems and it is understanding the shape and structure of the problems. And if wherever those things overlap, there’s opportunity there. 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 maybe it’s almost that simple. It’s almost there, but there’s a really important thing here that I haven’t gotten to in that equation.

People Are the Source of Hope

There’s another question I asked you in my survey that I haven’t mentioned yet. It was, what is giving you hope right now? And although one of you wrote Macallan 12, I don’t know about that. Reign that in a little bit. Most of you talked in this answer entirely about people. My friends, my family, my peers, over and over again. 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 it can be pretty easy to focus on the building and less on the people. This is an institute of technology, after all, not an institute of humanities. But I read the humanity in your answers.

Orienting Your Curiosity

And this brings me back to the simplicity of curiosity, leading you both toward understanding problems and acquiring new tools to deal with them. Because your curiosity is not out of your control. You decide how you orient it. And that orientation is going to affect the rest of your life dramatically. It may be the most important factor in your career.

And my guess is that it’s going to be really easy to focus on the very compelling and exciting and honestly not that complicated problem of just building ever more powerful tools. That’s exciting stuff. I love it. I love it. I love those podcasts where I listen to people talk about building powerful tools. But even though the problem space is much, much bigger, obviously, much bigger than build bigger tools, it is surprisingly easy to never notice that.

The most powerful mechanisms that steer our focus, I’m just going to say this, are not always designed for our best interests or the best interests of our world. We’ve got social content platforms that are great at steering our curiosities, but sometimes they’re great at steering it toward things that make us afraid or keep us oriented toward only the most impossible problems or the hottest rifts in society. Meanwhile, we have the capitalist impulse. It’s very good at keeping us oriented toward the problems that are most easily turned into money. And that means an over-weighting toward the problems that the most powerful and wealthy people are most interested in solving.

If we let ourselves be oriented by those forces, which I think are two of the most powerful ones that orient our curiosities, guess what? Problems we will never pay attention to, never be curious about, is the everyday solvable problems of normal people.

And I hope and I ask that you remain curious about your world’s intensely diverse and massive problem space. These are solvable problems, problems that are not being addressed because our world does not easily orient our curiosity 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.

And this isn’t about choosing between financial stability and your ideals. No, there is, as you progress in your career, there will be money to be made in these spaces because the problems are real. This is simply about who you include in your problem space and what you choose to be curious about.

My Advice From Heart and Experience

So with that in mind, here is my advice from my heart and my experience. First, don’t eat grass. I had to say this for a very specific reason and we’re going to move on.

Second, more importantly, one of the problems you will solve in your life is how you will find joy in an imperfect world. You might struggle with not feeling productive in that task unless and until you accept that your joy can be one of the things that you produce.

Third, ideas don’t belong in your head. They cannot help anyone in your head. I sometimes see people become addicted to their amazing idea. They love it so much they cannot 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 then you’ll still send me an email and be like, “I failed.” And I’ll be like, “I’m proud of you.”

Fourth, because people are very messy and complex, you may be tempted to build around them and not for them. And I understand this. But remember to ask yourself once a year or so, where do value and meaning originate? Where do they come from? Because they don’t come from banks or tech or cap tables. Value and meaning come from people. People things are the hardest work, but often the most important work. Orient yourself not just toward the construction and acquisition of new and powerful tools, but to the needs of people. And that includes you. And it includes people near you, your friends and your family.

Building Meaning and Living a Life

I think that we can sometimes feel like the world is so big that throwing a birthday party or making a playlist for a friend is just way too insignificant to task compared to the enormity of climate change or AI or 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 is not just about impact and productivity and problem solving. It’s about living a life. Do not forget this. It is so special and bizarre to get to live a human life. It took 3 billion years to go from the first single-celled organisms to this graduation ceremony. And that’s, for clarity, more than a quarter of the life of the whole universe is how long that took.

Something very special and strange is happening on this planet, and it is you. You. The greatest thing that you build in your life will be not just your bones, though those are amazing, it will be you, yourself. And trust me on this, you’re not done yet because 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.

Conclusion

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.

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