Here is the full transcript of YouTuber Mark Rober’s address to MIT Class of 2023.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
All right, good afternoon, esteemed faculty, distinguished guests, relieved parents, bored siblings, confused pets, and, of course, the 2023 graduating class of MIT. It is indeed a warm welcome. It’s hot. And you know what I love to do on a beautiful, sunny, 95-degree summer day?
Wear a big black blanket. At least I’m up here in the shade. You’d think the best engineering school on the planet could design a bigger audience for everyone. For next year.
Standing here before you is weird. I feel this pressure to give some timeless advice that will endure. Despite our world changing at an unprecedented pace, the world is so different even from four years ago. For example, for the undergrads, 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 text is still very new. So if I make any grammatical errors or threaten to end all human life, that did not come from me. That’s the robot.
Introducing Mark Rober
At this point, I should probably tell your parents who I am. I’m Mark Rober, a former Apple and NASA mechanical engineer who became a YouTuber. And yes, I know to some of you, it sounds like I just said I quit the MBA to work at Foot Locker. Or I traded a Picasso for an NFT of a stoned monkey.
But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I sort of feel at home here because Buzz Aldrin went to MIT. And just like me, Buzz was a NASA engineer. Only Buzz stuck with it and became one of the first humans to set foot on the moon.
Whereas I quit to become the first human to sprinkle porch pirates with glitter and fart spray. It’s on YouTube. Your kids will explain it at dinner. But whether it’s seeking karmic justice for package thieves or building an obstacle course for squirrels in my backyard, I plan my monthly YouTube videos really far out in advance.
In fact, 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 Video Intro
So if you’ve ever wanted to be in one of my videos, this is your chance. Now, will YouTube still be around in 30 years? Hopefully, unless Elon buys it. But here’s the thing.
The degree to which you positively impact the world is the degree to which you’ll be featured in the video. So in order to increase your chances of making the cut, I want to give you three pieces of advice based off my life experience.
The first bit of advice — to moisturize and getting a commencement speech — is to embrace naive optimism. What do I mean by naive optimism? Actually, before I go any further, usually in my YouTube videos, when I get to like the juicy part, I’m not really used to this public speaking thing. So the music kicks in. So if you’ll just give me a moment and hit this button, trust me, this can be better for both of us. Here we go. Right here. Let’s see. There we go. All right.
Naive Optimism
That’s better. OK, what do I mean by naive optimism? Naive optimism means it’s easier to be optimistic about your future when you’re sort of naive about what lies ahead, when you don’t know what you don’t know. As an example, think back on the first week at MIT, how naive you were about the number of all-nighters and cans of Red Bull that would be required to be sitting where you are right now.
In fact, you guys drink so much caffeine, I’m surprised you’re even sitting at all. If you truly understood what would be required, that discouragement might have prevented you from even starting. Sometimes it’s an advantage not to be the expert with all the experience. There’s no reputational risk.
So it’s easier to try new things and approach them from a fresh first principles approach. Naive optimism can also help when faced with a big life decision when you feel like you want to know the results before you decide. But the true outcome is simply unknowable.
Naive optimism means you have the irrational confidence of a child learning to walk or a mom learning to TikTok. And you pick what you think is the best path and just move forward knowing there’s more than one trail that leads to the top of Mount Fuji. It’s okay that you don’t know exactly what you want to be doing 20 years from now or what you want to have accomplished. And by the way, even if you do know, it doesn’t matter because you’re wrong.
Anyone who tells you they knew what they’d be where they’re at 20 years ago is either lying or delusional or a time traveler or Pat Sajak. Life is like trying to cross a big flowing river with lots of rocks and boulders strewn about. If you want to cross the river, you have to start on the bank and look at the first several rocks in front of you. You can wiggle them with your toe and sort of scan a few boulders out.
But at some point, you’ve just got to pick one and jump because the river is dynamic and always changing. If the first rock in this metaphor is a hobby, let curiosity and passion guide your initial step. If the first rock represents your professional career, take curiosity and passion into account. But you should also weigh what you’re good at and what the world needs, even if the world might not know they need it yet.
Whichever one you pick, the real secret is to dominate it, obsessively study it from every angle, master it.
Now, from your position and more secure footing, you can reevaluate the river and you’ll find you’ve got a few more rocks available that you couldn’t even see from where you started. So you can continue on your journey.
Instead of putting the pressure on myself to create some master-like plan, this attitude of naive optimism combined with dedication, enthusiasm, and the willingness to jump from my current safe rock to the next is what I feel has led me from college to NASA, to YouTube, to eventually landing on this rock of giving the commencement speech at M.I. fricking T.
Embrace Your Inexperience
There’s no way I could have predicted that path when I was exactly in your shoes 20 years ago. So cross your river one rock at a time, but do it with the naive optimism that it’s all going to work out. Let that be your North Star. If you actually knew how cold the river can get or how long it takes to recover from a sprained ankle, if you slipped, your knowledge might get in the way.
So have faith in yourself. You’re about to get a degree from MIT. So you’ve obviously made some pretty great decisions so far. Embrace your inexperience and keep taking leaps forward.
Apologies to all the civil engineering majors who have been grumbling, sitting there saying, “If he wants to cross this river so bad, why doesn’t he just build a suspension bridge?” Because it’s my metaphor. All right, back off. And now for some real talk.
You’re going to take that leap of faith, land on a rock and only then realize it’s not as stable as your foot wiggle had predicted. And you’re going to fall into the river sometimes. That leads to my second of three pieces of advice to maximize your chance of positively impacting the world and making the video cut, which is to frame your failures. You can tell the juicy part is the music’s back to illustrate what I mean by this.
Framing Failures
I have 50,000 of my YouTube followers that subscribe to my channel to play a simple computer programming puzzle that I made. But what they didn’t know is that I had served up two slightly different versions of the puzzle. In one, if you failed the puzzle, you didn’t lose any of your starting 200 points and you were prompted to try again. Whereas in the other, if you didn’t succeed, you were also prompted to try again.
But I said I was taking away five of those starting 200 points. That was the only difference. And even though they were no value in the real world, no one will ever see these completely fake, meaningless Internet points. Those who didn’t lose those points attempted to solve the puzzle two and a half times more and saw success 16% more of the time.
And because 50,000 people took the test, those results are super statistically significant. Basically, those who didn’t frame losing in the negative light stuck with it for longer, saw more success and learned more. And I think a great example of this in real life is video games.
When Super Mario Brothers first came out, my friends and I became obsessed with making it to the castle and wrestling Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. Water break. We’d get to school and ask each other, “Dude, what level did you make it to? Did you pass the game?” We never asked each other for details on all the different ways we might have died.
Video Game Mentality
This was before Call of Duty. When it comes to video games like this, no one ever picks up the controller for the first time, falls in the pit right away and thinks, “I’m so ashamed. That was such a failure. I’m never doing this again.”
How am I going to bring it to Luigi? I murdered his brother. What really happens is think, “OK, I got to remember there’s a pit there. Next time I’m going to come at it with a bit more speed.”
The focus and obsession is about beating the game, not how dumb you might look. You get hit by a sliding green shell. And as a direct result of that attitude of learning from but not being focused on the failures, we got really good and learned a ton in a very short amount of time. And in my personal and work life, I’ve dealt with my share of sliding green shells.
I still feel like every video we make each month, there’s a moment where it seems everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. And those failures can be gut-wrenching and they can seem real bad, but they seem like missing that one key Mario long jump right at the end of level 8-1. And right after that, really quickly, it turns into, “OK, what did we just learn from that? What should we try differently for next time?”
Reframing Challenges
And this concept of life imitation is more than just have a positive attitude or never give up because those imply you have to fight against your true desire to quit. And I feel like when you frame a challenge or learning process in this way, you actually want to do it. It feels natural to ignore the failure and try again in the same way a toddler will want to keep trying to stand up or in the same way you want to keep playing Super Mario Brothers or in the same way half the people who attempted my coding puzzle had a desire to stick with it two and a half times longer.
The framing of the failures made it so they wanted to keep trying and learning. And that’s exactly why the most meaningful high fives of my adolescence were when I said, “Dude, I finally beat Bowser last night.” Probably goes without saying, but girls didn’t talk to me until I was much older.
And in case you’re like, “Yeah, but my real life would just be so much better if my top five challenges disappeared.” Would it? I’d like to point out that if Super Mario Brothers was just jumping over one pit and then you rescued Princess Peach, no one would play it.
Where’s the risk and the reward? Where’s the challenge? There’s no ultimate feeling of satisfaction. The degree you’re getting today means so much to you precisely because of all the struggle and setbacks that you’ve had to endure.
Embracing the Journey
If you want to cross the river of life, you’re going to get wet. You’re going to have to backtrack. And that’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
Frame those failures and slips like a video game. And not only will you learn more and do it faster, but it will make all the successful jumps along the way that much sweeter. All right. I’ve got some good news, which is that you’re not crossing the river alone.
For my third and final bit of advice is to foster your relationships. A sad truth about getting older is life gets busier and busier and it gets harder and harder to make really close friends like you did here at school. And this isn’t great because we evolved to be social, cooperative creatures, right? Like 50,000 years ago, conditions were much harsher.
So those who are more inclined to cooperate with their fellow humans were also much more likely to succeed and pass on those cooperation genes. So we’ve inherited these brains designed for social interaction and we are hardwired to cooperate with other people. And look, I don’t blame you if you want to cast aside advice from a guy who makes a living trying to outwit squirrels, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that to 6 million years of evolutionary programming because today’s society, it’s really convenient just to isolate yourself.
The Importance of Human Connection
You can attend the board meeting from your kitchen table. You can order food in the shower. You can bank on the toilet. You can even look for a new apartment without leaving your apartment.
It’s easier to stay anonymous in our big cities versus the small tribes of our ancestors where everyone knew each other, which means we’ve got to actively work at fostering meaningful relationships. And because I know this could be harder for some more than others. Here’s a life hack I found that really helped.
Confirmation bias is when your brain ignores evidence that doesn’t support your belief. And then it cherry-picks the evidence that does. And generally when people hear this term, they think it’s a broken unscientific way for our brains to approach the world.
And this is true, but you could sort of judo flip it to your advantage. The trick is to positively apply confirmation bias to your relationships. If you assume good intentions on the part of your friends and family and you tell yourself you’re lucky to have them, your brain will naturally work to find evidence to support that.
The Power of Positive Assumptions
That’s just how our brains work. If you tell yourself that your fellow humans are inherently good, your brain will find examples of it everywhere and that will reinforce your outlook. The opposite, unfortunately, is also true.
Basically, whether you think the world and everyone in it is out to hurt you or help you, you’re right. Studies have shown that the best predictor of divorce is if a couple assumes bad intentions in their partner’s actions or if you marry Kanye. But if you get it in your head that your partner is selfish or inconsiderate or willfully refusing to take out the garbage that creates a negative feedback loop of confirmation bias, seeking to find further evidence that your spouse is a jerk, even when good faith efforts are being made.
And this hack works not just for spouses, friends and family, but even towards strangers who might infuriate you. And look, I agree with you. They’re wrong. But don’t forget, as George Carlin pointed out, “Anyone who’s driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.”
Fostering your relationships closes out my list of three bits of advice because that may be where your impact is the greatest due to a challenging upbringing. My mom barely graduated high school, but she took being a mom and instilling values in her children really seriously. As such, she’s the single biggest influence on my life by far.
The Ripple Effect of Relationships
She passed away over a decade ago from a last six months before I ever released my first YouTube video. But I love the idea that the ripples from her influence are still being felt as strongly as they ever have through the work that I try and do today.
If anything I’ve said today has resonated with you in my mind, it’s a direct result of her commitment to this third piece of advice to leverage confirmation bias to enhance your relationships as you cooperate to cross the river, train your brain to assume good intentions and try to remember if someone cuts you off on the freeway, maybe they’re not out to get you. Maybe they just have diarrhea.
Now, for piece of advice number four, engage in occasional playful anarchy. But Mark, you told us you were only going to give us three pieces of advice. Boom. Here’s the fourth. Why not?
I’m playing music in a commencement speech because why not? Is not ending your speech with pump-up music just objectively better? Or like how these graduation robes and hats are just objectively silly. Why shouldn’t I take my own fourth piece of advice right now and engage in some playful anarchy?
Embracing Playful Anarchy
Anybody can toss their hat in the air. We see it at every graduation, but few have dared to make it actually fly. But Buzz Aldrin never tried this. You know what? Timeout.
This is actually a great opportunity to review everything we just talked about. To my first point, I will embrace my naive optimism that my hat will actually get airborne. But if not, to my second point, if it goes haywire and I accidentally blow up E53, I can reframe the failure as an opportunity to renovate a very old and sketchy building. Maybe this time we’ll even add a few windows.
And then to my third point, when I get sued by the faculty, I will foster the relationship I have with my defense lawyers. Because settling with MIT over damages will bring us all closer together.
And so now, after turning on my hat, I’ve done my part and filmed a banger of an intro to our upcoming collab 30 years from now, which means all that’s left to do is your part to go out and change the world for the better. Congratulations, MIT Class of 2023. You totally got it. Thank you.
